Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2023 number 5S

The first experience of developing a legend and mapping a medium-scale “Population map of small rodents (Rodentia: Cricetidae, Muridae, and Sminthidae) of Primorskii krai” at a scale of 1:800 000 for the Russian Far East is outlined. The research was based on these authors’ material on the spatial distribution of myomorphic rodents collected by the authors during 1973-2004, and on published data (the analysis used more than 22 000 rodents of 12 species). The main principle in this study is the landscape-biotopical one, where the map legend is based on the habitat. A legend was developed, based on N.V. Tupikova’s principles. The pictograms proposed by N.V. Tupikova were a visual and informative alternative to the text rubrications of the map. We have generalized and reduced species abundance gradations to three (low, medium, and high), the semantic content of which has become individual for each species separately and reflects the maximum value of abundance noted in a particular type of habitat. The legend made it possible to estimate the polyvariance of the population, due to the asynchrony in the dynamics of the species included in them (contours with such structures can be characterized by increased instability). An analysis of data was carried out, which took into account the entire structural diversity of communities during the years of population peaks, not associated with regular changes in the population observed during changes in the population phases of abundance. The transformation of the structure of the animal population in the natural-anthropogenic succession series of the main plant formations is shown to give the map predictive and retrospective capabilities.