YURI IVANOVICH MANKO – A LIFE DEDICATED TO THE FOREST

Abstract

An article about the famous Far Eastern forester, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Honored Forester of Russia Yuri Ivanovich Manko (25.11.1931 – 19.02.2021). After graduating from the Siberian Forestry Institute in 1954, he was assigned to the Far Eastern branch of the SB Academy of Sciences of the USSR named after V.L. Komarov and taken to the Department of Botany and Plant Science in the Laboratory of Forestry, which was organized and headed by Professor Boris Pavlovich Kolesnikov. In 1966, already as part of the Biology and Soil Sience Institute, established in 1962, the laboratory was reorganized into a non-structural forest Department. In 1962, Yu.I. Manko defended his Candidate thesis «Natural regeneration of fir-spruce forests of the northern half of Sikhote-Alin and some issues of their structure and development», in 1985 – his doctoral dissertation «Ayan spruce (distribution, biology, classification of forest types, features of age structure and dynamics of phytocenoses». The scientific heritage of Yuri Ivanovich exceeds 330 publications on forestry, botany, soil science, botanical geography, history of science, nature conservation issues. Yuri Ivanovich Manko throughout his scientific activity developed and promoted the «genetic» or «geographical-genetic» direction of forest typology closely related to the forest formation process, which was developed on the basis of the scientific heritage of B.A. Ivashkevich-B.P. Kolesnikov. He supplemented the theory of the forest formation process by characterizing the zonal features of this process in the area of the Ayan spruce with autogenous vegetation development and exogenous destructive effects. They were shown that the spectrum of particular forest-forming processes is specific for various sub-formations and geographical facies, and their dynamics depends on geomorphological conditions and the speed of modern reliefforming processes. The name of Yuri Ivanovich Manko is inscribed in the history of Far Eastern science as an outstanding researcher of forests.