A group of 19 students from across Russia have arrived in the Lazovsky Nature Reserve, Primorye Territory, to help improve the reserve’s infrastructure.

In 2023, the team comprises 19 first- to fourth-year students from 10 Russian universities, namely the Buryat, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod and Primorye agricultural academies, Skryabin Academy of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology, the Far Eastern State Agrarian University, Donetsk State University, Pacific National University, as well as the Rostov and St Petersburg institutes of the State University of Justice.

The session in the Lazovsky Nature Reserve will last until 14 July, because the tourism season begins there on 15 July. During the six-week session, students will conduct technical maintenance of existing facilities and create two new eco trails.

Wooden staircases will be repaired, and a photo area will be organised on Petrov Island. The students’ mission at the Petrov Lodge is to repair trails and buildings and to build fences, glamping areas, staircases towards the lake and guard rails, as well as three bird watching huts. Excess vegetation will be removed from the Sea Patrol trail, which the Tiger student team built jointly with the reserve’s staff last year.

The team will help improve the eco trail in the Zarya Bay and the Tiger’s Den route. 

The 1.9-kilometre-long Zarya Bay area incudes Lake Zarya, where the students will revamp the viewing point, add a rest zone, build a 100-metre-long staircase towards the platform and lay 40 metres of flooring. Tourists can spot sika deer and Amur tiger tracks there. 

The Tiger’s Den is a new route that runs across the protected forest towards the den where at one point, a resident female tiger of the Lazovsky Reserve nursed her cubs. The den is empty now. Tourists who take this 4-kilometre route will be able to see the details of the Amur tiger’s life. The students will remove dead wood and branches from the route, level out the trail and add the necessary markings.

The students’ agenda includes not only improvement work but also lectures on ecology, methods of studying the rare species living in the southern regions of the Far East, the development of ecotourism and environmental education.

The professions of the Tiger team students are directly or indirectly connected with ecology, such as agricultural engineering, agronomy, biology (gamekeeping), veterinary science, biological water resources and aquafarming, geography, social studies, animal science, forestry and forest management, investigative proceedings, the legal aspects of national security, as well as environmental management.

The student team Tiger was established by the Amur Tiger Centre in 2014 to promote ecotourism in the Far East and train environmental protection specialists. It has been working in the Lazovsky Nature Reserve since 2016.