Rationale and Scope |
Inventory of existing collections.Museum collections of Sakhalin plants and animals are almost nonexistent outside Russia. As far as we could discover, Japanese collections are limited to plants, insects, and fishes, most of which were collected from very limited parts of southern Sakhalin before World War II: several thousand specimens of vascular plants studied by Miyabe and Miyake (1915), Kudo (1924), and Sugawara (1937-1940), and now deposited at the Faculty of Agriculture, Hokkaido University; about 10,000 insects (the butterflies and moths of which were studied by Nakahara, 1924; Matsumura, 1925; and Tamanuki, 1929), also archived at the Faculty of Agriculture, Hokkaido University; and less than 100 specimens of fishes, studied in part by Tanaka (1908), Tomiyama (1936), Miyadi and Ishii (1939a, 1939b), and Sato (1942) are deposited at the Faculty of Fisheries, Hokkaido University; the National Science Museum, Tokyo; and the University Museum, University of Tokyo. In the last decade, as a result of perestroika, some brief collecting trips by Japanese ecologists and resource scientists have produced collections, but these specimens, held in private collections, have not yet been made available to the scientific community (M. Yabe, pers. comm., 4 October 1999).
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![]() Study sites.We propose to survey all available habitats of Sakhalin Island, from sea-level sandy-, rocky-beach, and grassland-meadow to high-mountain conifer forest; from deep slow-moving lowland rivers to fast-flowing gravelly streams; and from ponds, swamps, and sphagnum bogs to high mountain lakes. Taxonomic breadth.Our focus will be on freshwater and terrestrial organisms, these being (1) far more vulnerable to adverse human impact and exploitation, and (2) more likely to provide the basis for significant future research (e.g., island biogeography). Within this selected assemblageand to be comparable with the goals of the Kuril Island Projectwe propose to sample lichens, mosses, liverworts, fungi, plants, insects, spiders, freshwater and terrestrial mollusks, freshwater and anadromous fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. Criteria for inclusion of various taxa include (1) those groups likely to display high levels of local endemism among subtaxa, (2) groups especially vulnerable to human impact, (3) groups comparable to those taxa surveyed during our seven seasons of collecting on the Kuril Islands, and (4) those taxa within the interest and expertise of personnel at the collaborating institutions. Additional taxa, especially birds and terrestrial mammals, would be highly desirable, but logistically impossible: limited space aboard the research vessel (see Available Facilities, p. 13) restricts the number of specialists to 12 for each participating nation, and with the inclusion of students being absolutely mandatory, there is simply no space. The rationale here is to concentrate our efforts and resources on the least known taxa (for a recent monograph on the birds of Sakhalin, see Nechaev, 1991).
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Cooperating organizations and agencies.The work will be shared almost exclusively by personnel from three organizations: (1) the University of Washington Burke Museum, Seattle; (2) institutes of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Vladivostok (primarily the Institute of Biology and Soil Sciences); and (3) various campuses and departments of Hokkaido University, Japan.
Project participants and responsibilities.The project will be directed and administered by the principal investigator, T. W. Pietsch, through the University of Washington Burke Museum, Seattle. Pietsch will take overall responsibility for pre-expedition planning, overseeing all aspects of the fieldwork, supervising post-expedition curation and dissemination of specimens, overseeing production and content of the web-site, and coordinating the production of reports and publications. The responsible individual in Russia will be V. V. Bogatov, Deputy Chief Academic Secretary and Chief of Scientific Investigations, Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch, Vladivostok. The responsible individual in Japan will be Mamoru Yabe, Faculty of Fisheries, Hokkaido University, Hakodate, Japan. Each of these three primary participants will direct and be responsible for the work carried out by personnel of his respective country.
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Training.A high percentage of the personnel associated with the field aspect of the project will be graduate students involved in various research projects in each of the seven major taxa under consideration. All will be given the opportunity to interact with, and receive training from, experts from all three participating nations. Each will take a full and active role in all major aspects of the work: collecting, identification, curation, and data collection and analysis. They will also share authorship and be full participants in the preparation of reports and publications. The provision to provide support for Russian and Japanese students to visit and work with collections at the Burke Museum, University of Washington, will be a further benefit to those whose future mandate will more directly lie with the long-term conservation and preservation of Russian Far East biotas. It is further envisioned (with financial assistance other than that requested here) that post-doctoral positions might be offered to particularly well-qualified Russian and Japanese students to allow for more long-term study at the University of Washington. |
Urgency.While most of Sakhalin now supports relatively undisturbed assemblages of plants and animals, the current economic situation poses a serious environmental threat, especially to the central and northern parts of the island, which are rapidly being developed and exploited for their rich deposits of oil and gas, and whose biota is considerably less well known than the southern part of the island. Russian policy at present is to populate and otherwise exploit the island as quickly and as extensively as possible. In 1993, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin, hoping to stimulate the economy and attract foreign investments, declared Sakhalin (as well as the Kuril Islands) a Free Economic Zone, providing tax advantages to businesses, and offering land at reduced rates and 99-year leases; priority has been given to exploitation of natural resources (e.g., oil and gas recovery, mining, and deforestation; M. K. Glubokovsky, pers. comm., 26 July 1993). The speed and extent to which habitats are being threatened on Sakhalin can be measured in part by the enormous amount of information on natural resource exploitation available on the Internet (search on Sakhalin and log on to any of a host of relevant sites, e.g., Sakhalin Oil & Gas News, Mobil and Texaco Sign Agreement, Remote Sakhalin Thirsts for Oil Boom, Exxon to Drill in Sakhalin Fields, Sakhalin Forests: Urgent Action Alert). It is imperative that we act now to explore, document, and protect the unique and delicate flora and fauna of this island before they are lost forever. |