Landscape structure of the constituents of Russian Federation (on the account of science-based solving of regional problems)

Abstract

Numerous regional problems of various kinds (demographic, economic, ecological et al.) are to a greater or lesser degree concerned with the influence of natural factors and the disbalance in relactions between mankind and geographical environment. The scientific ground of solving similar problems has to base on the integrated scope of geographical factors and the system of operational territorial units (OTU) that consider both administrative-territorial division of the country and its landscape structure. The complexity of this problem is determined by the mismatch of administrative-territorial and landscape borders and enormous (by three orders) differences in area size of Russian Federation's constituents and the degree of its landscape structure. The author devepoled the two-level structure of OUT based on the combination of substituents with the country's landscape macro- and mesoregions. In first case we get a few more than 200 derived «landscape-administrative» regions; the second case gives more than 400. Either kind of regions may serve as a territorial information medium (in the field of both natural and humanitarian geography) and primary (depending on scale and the territorial level of a problem) OUT that are subject to further grouping according to the particular aim of the study. Theproposedmethod was evaluated by the example of solving several problems (resource supply, nature use, ecological potential et al.) in the context of North-Western part of the European territory of Russia and partly to Russian Federation in whole.