The territory next to the Khakusy resort has many natural landscapes and tourist attractions. The fact offers many opportunities for scientific research. The scale and the evaluation of the human influence on the Lake Baikal’s environment is doubtlessly a very topical issue now..
In the period of holding of the first experimental shift of the Khakusy camp the participants of the eco-project held a complex landscape research. They plan to create a special map for estimation of the stability of this territory’s landscapes to anthropogenic impacts and to determine permissible activities and the threshold values of the impacts to the territory from the permissible tourist activities on the basis of their research.
A description of the territory based on 22 spots is a part of the experiment and research part of the program. The research was made according to special forms which included the basic parameters of components of ecological systems: lithogenous base, soils and vegetation. The researchers have made full complex descriptions and a few dozens of travel notes of the routes where they recorded coordinates of the spots, characteristics and features of the landscape, flora (grasses and the growing trees), soils, water conditions and so on.
These works deserve to be published in the profile scientific issues, Svetlana Solodyankina, an employee of Institute of Geography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences said. In the next few months the researchers will be busy preparing a more detailed scientific proof of their activities, processing and analyzing the findings.
“We have planned research of three walking routes. The longest one is a 30 km long return trip”, Slododyankina said. “We have made an estimation of the trail bed and its environment by the following criteria: speed of movement, pollution, resistance to damage and trampling and the drainage conditions of the location. Sixty two tourists have been interviewed in order to establish the tourists’ major expectations and reveal indispensable prerequisites for more environmentally friendly tourist activities. Based on the data gathered, they plan to prepare landscape- and landscape-evaluation maps of various scales and predict the outlook for the development of the Khakusy resort. Apart from the data-gathering mission, they also did a couple of things to improve the condition of the resort and its surroundings. They cleaned up the beach and the walking route from Khakusy to the caves, which is most popular with the tourists.
The eco-camp in Khakusy has become the first student ecological station that make it possible for young ecologists to put knowledge to practice and test the newest environmental practices under the guidance of their teachers and experts.
Surely, it is impossible to research the whole of the territory of Khakusy for one season. The Fund for Protection of Lake Baikal plans to go ahead with further active development of the eco-project and win more scientific data about the Lake Baikal with an eye to creating a model of the most exciting and comprehensive variant of tourist use of the Lake Baikal along with making the least possible harm to the nature.
A detailed physical-and-geographical research of the territory with foundation of new key plots and revelation of processes of formation of landscapes according to duplicate observations, research of stability of the landscapes to anthropogenic impacts, further sociological researches, ecological monitoring and many others are all included in the tasks for the eco-shifts to come.
