Pleistocene era park

"Pleistocene Park" - this is not the name of the next Hollywood masterpiece and not even the title of a science fiction book. This is the name of a bold scientific project to recreate a unique tundra landscape that existed in the northern latitudes during the Pleistocene.

This unique park is 160 square meters. km located in the north-eastern part of Yakutia, in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River. It was founded in order to recreate the tundra-steppe ecosystem on this territory. This ecosystem was characterized by high productivity, comparable in performance with steppes of temperate latitudes or African savannahs. Only in the steppe landscapes the niche of herbivores was occupied by herds of ungulates, and in the tundra steppes herds of mammoths, woolly rhinos, bison and large-horned deer grazed herds, which scientists believe that hunters from the Upper Paleolithic played a role in the extinction. But with the extinction of large herbivores 10,000 - 12,000 years ago, the fertile northern steppes degraded, there was no one to "mow" huge volumes of succulent grass, returning nutrients in the form of excrement to the soil and thereby fertilizing it. Grass, remaining virtually untouched, accumulated in large quantities by autumn and in cold climates was covered with a layer of permafrost. This process led to a decrease in nitrogen content, general depletion of soils, waterlogging of territories, and ultimately to a change in the entire ecosystem to a lower forest productivity tundra and tundra. But if the poverty of tundra soils is compensated by the introduction of nitrogen fertilizers, for example, manure, then fast-growing and high-calorie cereal plants appear in place of scarce mosses and lichens. The idea of the Pleistocene park is based on this.

The initiators of the project, led by ecologist Sergei Afanasevich Zimov, decided to revive this valuable fertile ecosystem with the help of herbivores that can live in the harsh conditions of the north. The forest-tundra territory was chosen for the park, and the first experiments on changing the landscape from the forest-tundra to the tundra-steppe began here in 1988. For the role of mammoths and woolly rhinos, Yakut horses, reindeer, moose, musk ox, bison and deer were chosen, with which the park was settled. But for a complete equilibrium ecosystem, predators must also be present in it. For this, bears and wolves were brought into the park. In the future, they plan to add lions and Amur tigers, which, according to biologists, are quite capable of existing in the northern latitudes.

The hopes of scientists were realized, and today the first changes occurring in the landscape of the park are already visible. Herbivores cleared thickets of weeds and shrubs, dealt with perennial deposits of dry dead grass and began to fertilize the soil with manure. The increase in soil fertility contributed to the growth of succulent, protein-rich herbs. But somewhere deep down, the park’s specialists hope that with the help of genetic engineering they will soon be able to clone the mammoth, perhaps the main inhabitant of the tundra steppes. Of the many remains that are regularly found in Siberia, scientists are trying to isolate the surviving DNA fragments, although it has not yet been possible to completely reconstruct the mammoth DNA. But science does not stand still, and, possibly, mammoths will graze in the north of Yakutia soon. After all, this is a real park of the Pleistocene era.