Geography of Siberia and the Far East, Institute of

of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, organized in 1959 in the city of Irkutsk. The institute studies complex geographic problems as well as questions of regional and applied geography (developing the taiga, principles of dividing a territory into districts, and principles of classifying areas according to landscape).

Research is done on the formation of the population, medical geography, the geography of production, and the evaluation of natural resources. The goals of the institute include the development of principles and methods for topical cartography (for example, landscape, medical-geographic, and geobotanic) and the preparation of topical maps. At the test stations of the institute, experimental physicogeographical observations are made, and research is done on the natural condition of the taiga and steppe landscape in order to predict changes in nature and clarify theoretical questions of landscape study. The institute has laboratories and geographic test stations in Western and Eastern Siberia. It has had a regional laboratory in Chita since 1963, and since 1968 it has operated the Southern Siberian Geographic Observatory in the urban settlement of Shushenskoe (Krasnoiarsk Krai). Since 1962 the institute has issued Doklady instituta geografii Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka (Reports of the Institute of Geography of Siberia and the Far East) and the yearbook Sibirskii geograficheskii sbornik (Siberian Geographical Collection), as well as various publications on physical and economic geography.