From land inventory to their certification (views of L. G. Ramenskii and their development in the USSR)

The article is devoted to one of the activities of the outstanding domestic ecologist Leonty Grigorievich Ramen-skii. In the 1930s, Ramenskii began to develop theoretical and practical issues of lands typology. In essence, the concept of the land’s typology by Ramenskii does not differ from the classification of biotopes, which began to be developed in European countries about 30 years ago under such projects as CORINE, Palaearctic Habitats, EUNIS. Only their results use differs. The lands typology is intended for the economic exploitation of biotopes, and their classification in the CORINE, Palaearctic Habitats, EUNIS projects for their protection. Ramenskii creat-ed a new direction of ecology, namely, the typology of lands, or in other words, the science of the typology of biotopes. Academician V. R. Williams was a strong opponent of the development of this direction of science in the USSR. Detailed characterization of biotopes was accompanied by their mapping. This characteristic was called land certification. Large areas of vacant land appeared in the first half of the 1940s in the North Caucasus and Kalmykia. There was an urgent need for certification of these lands. Ramenskii prepared instructions for carrying out certification. Similar instructions were reprinted several times in the future. In accordance with these instructions, it is necessary to carry out mapping of lands during their certification on a scale of 1 : 10000–1 : 25000 for agricultural areas and 1 : 25000–1 : 50000 for desert, semi-desert and mountainous areas. The author believed that this was nothing more than a mapping of biotopes, designed for their agricultural exploita-tion. Since the late 1950s, the certification of natural forage lands began to be carried out everywhere throughout the Soviet Union. The instructions indicated that re-survey of hayfields and pastures should be carried out, as a rule, every 15 years, and in areas of intensive use after 10 years. In Russia, large-scale mapping of natural hay-field and pasture biotopes ceased in the early 1990s with the transition to market forms of farming. In Western Europe, large-scale biotope mapping began 30-40 years later than in the Soviet Union.