Together with the Russian Academy of Sciences, IIASA's Forestry (FOR) project has released a CD-ROM titled Land Resources of Russia, Version 1.1, containing socioeconomic and biophysical data sets on important targets of international conventions — climate change, wetlands, desertification, and biodiversity. The CD-ROM, a country-scale integrated information system, supports sustainable use of land resources in line with Chapter 10 of Agenda 21 (UNCED) and makes a contribution to the Rio+10 Summit.

The Project's analysis of land resources are crucial for doing full greenhouse gas (or carbon) accounting. Integrated land analyses are also important for the introduction of sustainable forest management. FOR's land analyses concentrate on Russia, which is used as a case study for full carbon and greenhouse accounting.

Russia's area of forests, called here the forest zone, covers about 1180 million ha or 69% of the land of the country. The forested area (forests forming closed stands) occupies some 765 million ha constituting 65% of the forest zone. Forests are elements of a land-cover mosaic that direct the features of landscapes, ecosystems, vegetation and land uses. The FOR project attempts to overcome the traditional approach of just considering the direct utilities of forests. Instead, FOR operates with a holistic view of forests in a fully-fledged land concept. Integrated analysis of the land requires extended databases that includes various data for the total land operated in the form of GIS-based tools.

The land databases on Russia are the most comprehensive ever assembled, inside or outside of Russia. The databases have been enriched by remotely sensed data, biogeochemical functionality (carbon analysis), and institutional frameworks. The data included on the CD-ROM have been specially selected and filtered to meet the following criteria: (1) completeness: to meet a variety of the analysis tasks; (2) complexity: to describe a diversity of the task aspects; (3) consistency: to provide compatible results; to be ata compatible scale and, to provide a compatible time horizon; and (4) uniformity: to allow them to be standardized and formatted according to modern data handling routines.

The following databases and coverages are included on the CD-ROM and are available for download:

Socioeconomic Database -- Describes the social environment of each administrative region in Russia with close to 7000 parameters. The data cover the years 1987-1993. Coverages in this section include:

(1) Socioeconomic Statistical Database. This database provides the following statistical data sets: Population; Labor and Salary; Industry; Agriculture; Capital Construction; Communication and Transport; State Trade and Catering; Utilities and Services; Health Care and Sport; Education and Culture; Finance; Public Consumption; Industrial Production; Interregional Trade; Labor Resources; Supply of Materials; Environmental Protection; Foreign Trade; and Price Indices.

(2) Population Database. Adapted from Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and World Resources Institute (WRI). 2000. Gridded Population of the World (GPW), Version 2, this coverage contains population densities for 1995 on a 2.5 degree grid. Data were adjusted to match United Nations national population estimates for 1995.

(3) Administrative Oblasts, Cities & Towns Database. Oblasts coverage contains 92 polygons, 88 of which contain Oblast names, the other four represent waterbodies. The cities coverage contains 37 cities identified by name.

(4) Transportation Database. The statistical data sets and maps cover the transport routes of the railway, road, and river networks spanning the entire country. Railways and roads are classified by type and status, and major rivers are named. Map coverages (line data) were created from the Digital Chart of the World, using the 1993 version at the 1:1,000,000 scale.

Natural Conditions Database. This section of the CD-ROM contains the basic land characteristics. This database provides specialists and scientists in research institutes and international agencies with the capability to perform scientific analysis with a Geographic Information System. These data describe land characteristics that might be applied in various ways, such as individual items (e.g., temperature, elevation, vegetation community, etc.), in combination (e.g., forest-temperature associations, soil spectra for land use types, etc.), and as aggregations based on a conceptual framework of a different level of complexity (e.g., ecosystem establishment, human-induced land cover transformation, biochemical cycle analysis, etc.). Coverage includes:

(1) Climate Database. Temperature (annual and seasonal) and Precipitation... Visit https://dataone.org/datasets/Land_Resources_of_Russia%2C_Version_1.1.xml for complete metadata about this dataset.

Representative samples of populations in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This is our follow-up survey (from 2014) in the three Baltic countries but without additional sampling of their respective Russian speaking minorities. Special focus is on the handling of the covid pandemic in the Baltic countries, but the survey also covers attitudes towards the EU, migration, democracy, and Russia against the backdrop of its aggression in Ukraine.

This data set is the Former Soviet Union (FSU) portion of the Generalized World Forest Map (WCMC, 1998), a 1-kilometer resolution generalized forest cover map for the land area of the Former Soviet Union. There are five forest classes in the original global generalized map. Only two of those classes were distinguished in the geographical portion comprising the FSU.

This data set is a 1:2.5 million scale forest cover map for the land area of the Former Soviet Union that was completed in 1990 (Garsia 1990). There are forty-five classes distinguished in this data set, of which 38 are forest cover classes. The purpose of this map was to create a generalized and up-to-date map of forest cover for the USSR. This map should not be viewed as a detailed forest cover map but more like an economic forestry map. The most important tree species of a region are highlighted rather than the dominant trees species or tree cover. Very few tree species are defined. In many cases, of course, the dominant and the most important trees species are the same.