Yakutia

The Yakutia Wilderness is envisioned along the East Siberian Arctic coast and upon the off shore islands. It would stretch east from beyond the Lena River Delta on the west to the Kalyma River in the east - approximately 1500 kilometers. The included lands are primarily mossy tundra, rising into mountains to the south. Natural corridors would connect this great wilderness to tundra to the west and east and to the boreal forest to the south.

This wilderness is visualized as a home for a wide assortment of megafauna that can thrive in an arctic environment - similar to the Pleistocene Park envisioned by Sergey A. Zimov and described in a 2005 Science article. Beside wildlife currently extant in these lands, the wilderness would include representatives of pleistocene fauna found elsewhere as well as recreations of extinct megafauna such as the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinocerous.

The table below lists wildlife inhabitants proposed to act as stand-ins for Pleistocene creatures that are now extinct. The modern representatives are either closely related genetically or would play a similar ecological role.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

Most symbolic of these now extinct animals is the Woolly Mammoth, dwarf representatives of which survived on Wrangel Island for thousands of years after the Pleistocene era ended. Recreation of hairy Pleistocene species is not the fantasy that many people might imagine. 

From mural depicting a herd walking near the Somme River in France
From mural by Charles R. Knight, 1916

As pointed out by Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale, "Hairiness is one of those characteristics that can increase or decrease in evolution again and again. Vestigial hairs, with their associated cellular support structures, lurk in even the barest-seeming skin, ready to evolve into a full coat of thick hair at short notice... Look at the woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses that rapidly evolved in response to the recent ice ages in Eurasia."

The return of the Pleistocene megafauna presages the renewal of the tundra steppe, the grasslands associated with and maintained by these great creatures. Without such renewal, the carbon now sequestered in the soils of the mammoth ecosystem could end up as greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by rising temperatures, surpassing the total carbon content of all the planet's rain forests. Restored Pleistocene grasslands could stabilize the soil and prevent permafrost from melting.

The feeding habits of the megafauna could also prevent the growth of shrubs in the tundra and the movement of the boreal forest further north. Widespread shrub and tree expansion, by absorbing more of the sun's heat, could further magnify atmospheric heating over Arctic lands.

The Pleistocene Megafauna Chart below presents some of these Pleistocene species that may have inhabited the area of the proposed Yakutia Wilderness. Those species with a darker gray background are extinct.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.