Wildfires in permafrost areas, including smoldering fires (e.g., “zombie fires”), have increasingly become a concern in the Arctic and subarctic. Their detection is difficult and requires ground truthing. Local and Indigenous knowledge are becoming useful sources of information that could guide future research and wildfire management. This paper focuses on permafrost peatland fires in the Siberian subarctic taiga linked to local communities and their infrastructure. It presents the results of field studies in Evenki and old-settler communities of Tokma and Khanda in the Irkutsk region of Russia in conjunction with concurrent remote sensing data analysis. The study areas located in the discontinuous permafrost zone allow examination of the dynamics of wildfires in permafrost peatlands and adjacent forested areas. Interviews revealed an unusual prevalence and witness-observed characteristics of smoldering peatland fires over permafrost, such as longer than expected fire risk periods, impacts on community infrastructure, changes in migration of wild animals, and an increasing number of smoldering wildfires including overwintering “zombie fires” in the last five years. The analysis of concurrent satellite remote sensing data confirmed observations from communities, but demonstrated a limited capacity of satellite imagery to accurately capture changing wildfire activity in permafrost peatlands, which may have significant implications for global climate.

The paper reveals opportunities and limitations of tourism development in one of the most inaccessible areas in the mountains of Southern Siberia: Todzhinsky kozhuun, Republic of Tyva, RF. Taking into account key indicators that reflect the natural, historical, cultural, and socio-economic characteristics of the territory, using GIS technologies, a comprehensive assessment and mapping of the tourism and recreational potential (TRP) of the territory was carried out. The method of multicomponent scoring was used in this work. Consequentially, the study area was divided by means of a regular hexagonal network into many operational territorial cells; for each of those, the sum of scores was calculated according to the conditions and objects that are localized within its boundaries. The set of operational territorial cells filled with visual information made it possible to create an assessment map of the tourism and recreational potential of the Todzhinsky kozhuun territory. This map highlights the areas of the five value ranks, from the highest to the lowest. The areas with the highest scores are obviously the most suitable for the development of tourism industry. In general, the basis of the region’s TRP is picturesque virgin natural landscapes with many large lakes, unique traditional ethnocultural landscapes of the mountain–taiga reindeer herders, biological resources for hunting and fishing, and healing mineral springs (arzhany). The key limiting factor in the development of tourism is the underdeveloped transportation system and the insufficiency of special tourism infrastructure facilities. Such an assessment made it possible to identify territories favorable for the creation of three specialized tourist clusters: ethnocultural tourism, “Reindeer herders of Todzhi”; water, ecological, and fishing tourism, “Todzha Lakes”; and mountain and sports tourism, “Big Sayan”.

The territory of the Baikal region, which, on the one hand, is promising for the development of various types of economic activity, and on the other hand, unique and highly valuable from an ecological point of view, requires scientifically based land use planning. Landscape and physical-geographical scientific studies in the Baikal region were started in the 1960s after the foundation of scientific institutions majoring in natural sciences in Irkutsk. The Siberian School of Landscape Studies was established at the Institute of Geography of the SB RAS, methods for mapping and classifying geosystems at different hierarchical levels, methods for biota mapping, and methods for landscape planning have been developed. At the moment, as an information basis for solving various applied problems, a landscape map of the south of Eastern Siberia (M 1

The accuracy of Land Surface Temperature (LST) products retrieved from satellite data in mountainous-coastal areas is not well understood. This study presents an analysis of the spatial and temporal variability of the differences between the LST and in situ observed air and surface temperatures (ISTs) for the southeastern slope of Lake Baikal’s surroundings. The IST was measured at 12 ground observation sites located on the southeastern macro-slope of the Primorskiy Ridge (Baikal, Russia) within an elevation range of 460–1656 m above sea level from 2009 to 2021. LST was estimated using 617 Landsat (7 and 8) images from 2009–2021, taking into account brightness temperature, surface emissivity and vegetation cover fraction. The comparison of the LST from satellite data and the IST from ground observation showed relatively high differences, which varied depending on the season and site type. A neural network was suggested and calibrated to improve the LST data. The corrected remote-sensed temperature was found to reproduce the IST very well, with mean differences of about 0.03 °C and linear correlation coefficients of 0.98 and 0.95 for the air and surface IST.

A method of typological mapping of landscapes with the use of Landsat satellite images and the digital elevation model SRTM, as well as the method of factorial-dynamic classification of landscapes, was developed and a large-scale landscape map of the Mondy basin was created. At the first stage, the image was automatically classified using the neural network classification method, resulting in a picture divided into 11 classes. The resulting classified image was smoothed to remove the mosaic effect and translated into a vector map. For each unit obtained as a result of the classification of the satellite image, the following parameters were calculated by means of spatial analysis in the GIS

Presented are the isolines maps for the distribution of inhomogeneous values of acid-alkaline medium and biochemical activity levels of soils in the industrial city of Bratsk in the settings of Eastern Siberia. The maps were constructed from point measurements in the geoinformation environment by the IDW Nearest Neighbors method. The soil biochemical activity was analyzed by using the proximate method according to T. V. Aristovskaya and M. V. Chugunova. It is shown that the activity of urban soils varies from strong to moderate. The soils with high activity occupy 75,3 % of the total area of the city. The acid-alkaline conditions of soils are transformed considerably toward the alkaline side. On the hole, the alkaline and highly alkaline soils occupy 96% of the territory. A high level of soil biochemical activity has been revealed. This study deals with the transformation of nitrogen-containing organic compounds leading to a loss of biogenic nitrogen by the soil.