Ramona DeNies, Wild Salmon Center, February 10, 2022
Tugur watershed
““There aren’t too many places like this on Earth,” he says. “These rivers are capable of growing salmonids that surpass 100 pounds, and they support amazing wildlife: Steller’s sea eagles, Blakiston’s fish owls, wolves, brown bears, moose, Manchurian elk, and dozens of other species.” ”
In January, two areas of the Russian Far East totaling 3.7 million acres were set aside for protection under the “stronghold” strategy championed by Portland-based Wild Salmon Center and its Russian partners. The reserves, primarily along the Tugur and Maia watersheds, are home to 100-pound taimen and various salmon species. Not only do these protections help guard against logging, mining, and development, they also act, much like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, as some of the planet’s most effective carbon sinks, crucial in the fight against climate change.
Last month, in a huge step forward for the stronghold protection strategy developed over the past two decades by partners including the Russian Academy of Sciences and regional fisheries agencies, the government of Khabarovsky-Krai officially created two massive new protected areas on the Tugur and Maia watersheds—a combined area of 3.7 million acres.
Together, the two reserves constitute an area roughly one-and-a-half times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. The designations add to earlier successes by our Russian partners to protect places like the Kol River in Kamchatka, the Vengeri and Pursh-Pursh Rivers on Sakhalin Island, and the establishment of the Shantar Islands National Park just north of the Tugur in Khabarovsk.
According to Rahr, these combined protections are helping to act as a brake against expanding threats from logging, mining, and industrial development in the Russian Far East. In the Tugur alone, local conservation and fishing interests have battled new logging concessions and placer gold mining operations in recent years.