Word: amur
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...Pacific coast; however, convention has labeled as Siberia all Russian lands east of the Urals--an area that covers more than 5 million sq. mi. Within these boundaries are nearly the entire lengths of four of the longest rivers on earth--the Yenisey, the Ob, the Lena and the Amur, which constitutes most of Siberia's border with China. Yakutia, now designated the Sakha Republic and the largest of Siberia's dozens of political divisions, is more than seven times the size of California. Magadan is three times; Krasnoyarsk is nearly six Californias. The entire region is frigid in winter...
...environmental safeguards. Buying time for one purpose will inevitably come at the expense of the other. Environmentalists have reason to be wary. In recent years, the decline in law and order in the former U.S.S.R. has led to a tremendous increase in poaching, particularly of the Amur tiger. Tigers once roamed Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific and from the Chinese border to the Arctic. Now only the Amur subspecies remains, hemmed in to the forests of Primorski province by the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese border...
...left the local wildlife departments broke and officials susceptible to bribes. Amid this collapse of enforcement, "the poacher owns the taiga," says Steven Galster, who monitors conservation efforts from Vladivostok for Britain's Tiger Trust. Not content with staking out areas frequented by the cats, some hunters stalk the Amur tiger on horseback with the help of dogs...
...killed, and the poaching continues unabated this year. A new study of tiger-population dynamics led by biologist John Kenney of the University of Minnesota suggests that even moderate poaching makes extinction a virtual certainty once a tiger census drops below 120. Unless the Russian government controls hunting, the Amur tiger will cross that threshold within two or three years...
Oddly, the Siberian tiger -- a critically endangered subspecies -- may have the best chance of survival, but only if poaching is controlled. "The Amur tiger has 800 miles of unbroken habitat to move through," says Howard Quigley, who is co-director of the Siberian Tiger Project, a Russian-American conservation effort, "but unless poaching is stopped, there will be no tigers to move through it." The Tiger Trust and the World Wildlife Fund offered vehicles, training and supplemental pay for Russian wildlife rangers, but the killing of tigers continued as those proposals languished for months on the desks of bureaucrats...