Ukraine’s calling card

Ukrainian academics first decided to produce a national atlas in 1992. But they had to postpone this work because of the unstable political situation. Scholars at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine began to collect materials for the atlas only in the early 2000s. Now Ukraine’s “visiting card,” as the academics have dubbed the atlas, has been published in a print run of 5,000 copies, which will be distributed to all government bodies, libraries, and civic and state institutions. The authors of the atlas hope that it will become Ukraine’s information face and help bring us closer to other countries.

“The National Academy of Sciences has always focused attention on resolving scholarly problems of nationwide importance, one of them being the creation of the National Atlas of Ukraine,” said Borys Paton, the president of the Academy. “Today approximately 100 countries of the world have these kinds of atlases, which contain important scientific, nature- related, and historical information. So we decided not to lag behind our foreign colleagues and prepared our own atlas, which offers an integrated picture of our country. The one- volume National Atlas of Ukraine contains over 800 maps of various scales, almost 100 pages of text, and many diagrams and illustrations. The main volume is supplemented by a book of texts and legends in English and Russian.”

Five hundred experts from 50 research institutions were involved in producing the atlas. They collected and streamlined the material according to six thematic chapters: General Characteristics, History, Natural Conditions and Resources, Population and Human Development, Economy, and the Ecological State of the Environment. According to Leonid Rudenko, director of the NAN’s Institute of Geography and chief editor of the atlas, the publication will help people master a huge array of verbal and digital information.

“When we were preparing the atlas, we had a very important task in front of us: to collect the entire scientific, sociopolitical, historical, and geographical information about Ukraine that has accumulated over the past years and supplement it with new data so that the atlas would meet contemporary requirements,” Rudenko explained. “To make the atlas more practical — because it’s quite difficult to handle a book measuring 35 x 47 cm — we added textual explanations to each chapter. So if readers see a seismic map, they can familiarize themselves with the dynamic of earthquakes in Ukraine and also read additional information on this natural phenomenon.”

It was a truly unwieldy and painstaking job to create the National Atlas of Ukraine. The authors used data collected by the State Statistics Committee (to produce a map on changes in Ukraine’s population since 1897), aerial and space photographs, and the findings of a number of Ukraine’s top research institutions. But the launch of the Ukrainian atlas does not mean the end of the scholars’ work. Since the data will become obsolete over time, it will be updated in the electronic version of the atlas.