The photographs and the map show a sad nature conservation story issue with a happy end.
The Mukhrino station had been under threat of the newly constructed oilfield road coming right through the experimental area (crossing boardwalk path near its beginning close to forest) and going from the North to the South across Mukhrino bog. Yes, that is good for transportation to the station, one could say. But for everyone born with some addiction to wild nature that is disturbing news. And actually we know that the road constructed across a peatland ecosystem would create too much disturbance and quick shift in communities due to change of natural hydrological regime. This would add influential anthropogenic factor to the whole ecosystem monitoring observations which are currently held in intact conditions.
Well, apart from our bad feelings and our poor forecasts we didn’t have the rights to change the plans of the oilfield company as the land was not legally assigned to the University up to date. There was some atempt to do so but without success due to lots of bureaucracy.
But thankfully we have good news. There was some call for help from MFS, and the comission from the government people, University and the oil company administrations decided to take the road 2 km aside of the station to the Western part of the bog. Even though there was already an exploration profile and some other work already done to prepare the road construction in its previous direction.
Thereby we are celebrating a small victory in conservation of some piece of intact nature surrounding the station.

Dull weather conditions like this quite matching your fillings when you see the exploration markings (10 m apart from the boardwalk) of a new planned road.

A recently made exploration clearing crossing the boardwalks; now it is abundaned and all works moved to the newly accepted position.

The red line shows a newly planned road, the yellow line – its previous position across the MFS area. A thin red line marks the boardwalks.