During the last 20 years rates of clear felling in Ukraine increased because of changes in forest laws. Old forests near the southern border of forest zone and species, associated with old forests suffered from cutting first of all. Forest harvesting and sanitary forest cuttings in Ukraine are limited only on some high-level protected areas (less than 5% of forest area). Ukrainian laws are able to protect the habitats of rare species, but there is a lack of real-time data on their distribution and population status. It is possible to protect small old forest patches using the Governmental Cadastre of Animal World of Ukraine. We will inform the Governmental Cadastre about localities of Red Listed species.

After that, the Cadastre Service will inform the local forest districts about presence of these species, measures on their protection and amenability for their habitat destruction. We will investigate 23 forest massifs with total area of 83000 ha (each from 25 to 16000 ha) where no forest protecting measures have previously been made. We will focus on the next animal groups: butterflies, beetles, reptiles, birds of prey, bats. On each forest area we will estimate status and population size of rare species. Also in old forest territories we will describe plant communities, search for rare species of other groups of living organisms and assess the state of rare plant communities. As the result we are going to create network of different scale protected territories taking into account connectivity between patches. The other part of the project is wide informing of public about the state of local forests. This part will include creation of the Internet site “The nature of Kharkiv region” and publication of papers about forest conservation in local media.