Located in northern Siberia, barely 100 km from the Arctic Circle, the Poutorana Plateau has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its arctic and subarctic ecosystems enclosed in a mountain range. Between taiga, tundra, desert, rivers and lakes, this plateau-natural reserve is unique in the world and is home to magnificent and emblematic landscapes of northern Russia. It is also possible to observe migrating wild reindeer, a very rare natural phenomenon.
The Poutorana Plateau is located in the northwest of central Siberia. It covers just under 2 million hectares and is almost entirely guarded. The Plateau was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010, as the area facilitates the observation of arctic and subarctic ecosystems (fauna and flora). The place is untouched by humans, which allows the reserve to be completely natural, without being artificially modified.
An extraordinary and totally preserved place
Due to its immense size, the Poutorana Plateau offers extremely varied, totally natural landscapes. The geological characteristics of the place allowed the formation of deep canyons with a significant amount of watercourses forming thousands of waterfalls. Nearly 25,000 lakes have been counted and most of them form unique fjords thanks to the mountainous relief. The geographical location also has certain characteristics: located in a boreal zone with an almost arctic climate, the plateau has forests and carpets of lichens that are unusual for this geographical location, which accentuates the originality of the place.
The location between two biomes (taiga and tundra) of the plateau triggers a modification of the ecosystems with the appearance of species more present than they should have been. The place is rich in plant species found in the Arctic, but also in Eastern and Western Siberia. This mixing of ecosystems promotes the growth of this transitional biome and this allows species that are more endemic to a specific region to be able to move to another environment. In addition, this place can be used to study the effects of climate change on the large ecosystems of the Arctic, since the Poutorana Plateau presents similar characteristics with this type of biome.
Clearly, it is a unique place in the world with typical Siberian landscapes without any trace of human activity.
