Natural Vegetation and Soils

The broad zones of natural vegetation and soils of Russia correspond closely with the country’s climate zones. In the far north a tundra vegetation of mosses, lichens, and low shrubs grow where the summers are too cool for trees. Permafrost, or permanently frozen subsoil, is found throughout this region. The ground is frozen to great depths, and only a shallow surface layer thaws in summer to provide a limited sustenance to plants.

Forests cover more than two-fifths of the territory of Russia, the greater part lying in the Asian region. Taken altogether, the forests account for nearly one-fourth of the world’s forest area. The country’s forest zone is divisible into a large northern part, the boreal forest, or taiga, and a much smaller southern area, the mixed forest.

The taiga is south of the tundra; it occupies the northern two-fifths of European Russia and extends to cover much of Siberia and far eastern Russia. Much of this region also has permafrost. The vast taiga zone is made up primarily of coniferous trees, but in some places small-leaved trees such as birch, poplar, aspen, and willow add to the diversity of the forest. The taiga contains the world’s largest coniferous forest, representing about one-half of the earth’s softwood timber. In the extreme northwestern part of the European region the taiga is dominated by a variety of pines, although significant numbers of fir, birch, and other trees are also present. Eastward to the western slopes of the Urals, pines are still common, but firs predominate, and in some regions almost pure stands of birch exist. The taiga of the West Siberian Lowland is made up primarily of various species of pine, but along the southern fringes of the forest, birch becomes dominant. Throughout much of the Central Siberian Upland and the mountains of the far eastern region, larch, a deciduous coniferous tree, becomes dominant.

Throughout the taiga zone, the trees are generally small and rather widely spaced. A considerable amount of land is also devoid of trees, primarily because of poor local drainage; in these areas marsh grasses and bushes form the vegetative cover. The soils of the taiga are podzolic in character and are infertile, having been leached of most of their plant minerals by the abundance of acidic groundwater.

A mixed forest, containing both coniferous and broadleaf deciduous trees, occupies the central portion of the eastern European Plain from Saint Petersburg in the north to the border with Ukraine in the south. The mixed forest is dominated by coniferous evergreen trees in the north and broadleaf trees in the south. The principal broadleaf species here are oak, beech, maple, and hornbeam. A similar forest of somewhat different species prevails throughout much of far southeastern Russia along the middle Amur River valley and south along the Ussuri River valley. Gray-brown forest soils are found in the mixed forest zone. They are not as infertile as the soils in the taiga to the north, and with proper farming methods and heavy fertilization they can be kept quite productive.

To the south, the mixed forest grades through a narrow zone of forest-steppe before passing into the zone of true steppes. Although now largely under cultivation, the forest-steppe has a natural vegetation of grasslands with scattered groves of trees. Averaging about 150 km (about 95 mi) wide, this zone stretches east across the middle Volga Valley and southern Ural Mountains into the southern portions of the West Siberian Lowland. Isolated areas of this zone can be found in the southern intermontane basins of eastern Siberia.

True steppe, a mixture of grasses with only a few stunted trees in sheltered valleys, is the natural vegetation of a region that includes the western half of the North Caucasian Plain and a strip of land extending east across the southern Volga Valley, southern Urals, and parts of western Siberia. Like the forest-steppe zone, much of the steppe has been put under cultivation.

Both the forest-steppe and the steppe have fertile soils and together form a region, known as the black-earth belt, that is the agricultural heartland of Russia. The forest-steppe has black chernozem soils that are high in humus content and have about the right balance of minerals for the cultivation of most crops. The forest-steppe has a better moisture supply than the steppe during the growing season, and consequently is the best agricultural area of Russia. The soils of the steppe, known as brown-steppe soils, are not quite as rich in humus as the chernozems to the north, but are very high in mineral content.