The fourth session of the Tiger student team that started on 1 June 2019 has completed its first working week at the Lazovsky Nature Reserve. In the next six weeks, 24 students from Russia and abroad will help employees of the nature reserve create ecotourism infrastructure on the protected Petrov Island.  

The team will be busy setting up an eco-trail: they will finish the big project their fellow students were working on for the past three seasons. At the moment, the team is repairing the boardwalk of the eco-trail.

“Our first task is not only to repair the trail, but also to preserve the protected Petrov Island. When the trail opens to the public, people will see that they are in the wild; the purpose of an eco-trail is to minimise human impact on the environment,” said Vladimir Aramilev, head of the Joint Directorate of the Lazovsky Nature Reserve and Call of the Tiger National Park, after inspecting the work area.

According to Aramilev, it is a great honour and responsibility for students to create an eco-trail on Petrov Island. He also said that the team includes students from other countries – Kyrgyzstan and Poland – as part of the project to research and exchange experience in training experts in environmental preservation.

“Of course, the students from Kyrgyzstan and Poland can help (and are helping) their Russian peers in the construction of eco-trails in the protected area, but they are doing it voluntarily at their own discretion. The inclusion of students from foreign countries in the team is a next step in the development of the volunteer movement, and will expand environmental awareness and promote the importance of the Lazovsky Nature Reserve for Amur tiger conservation,” Aramilev said.

The Tiger student team comprises seven young women and 17 young men, all of them students majoring in fields related to environmental protection. Among them are students from Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Blagoveshchensk, Tomsk, Voronezh and Kazan, as well as foreign students from the Kyrgyz Republic and Poland.

The Tiger student team is an educational project founded in 2014 by the Amur Tiger Centre in order to develop ecotourism in the Far East and to train experts in environmental protection.

The project is underway at two federal protected areas of the Primorye Territory: the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve and the Lazovsky Nature Reserve.