Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve
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How it came to be
Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve lies in southwestern Tajikistan, where the Vakhsh and Panj rivers meet to form the Amu Darya. Besides the tugay riverine forests on its floodplain terraces, it takes in the sandy Kashka-Kum desert, Buritau peak and the Hodja-Kaziyon mountains. According to UNESCO these are the largest and most intact tugay forests of their type in Central Asia, and the only place where the Asiatic poplar tugay ecosystem survives in its original state over so large an area.
The reserve was established on 4 November 1938 as Tajikistan's first state nature reserve. The area was one of the last strongholds of the Caspian tiger, whose tracks were last seen in the reserve in 1953. The Bactrian deer, once the tiger's main prey, still lives there.
An IUCN expert visited the reserve in October 2022, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2023. Reports also note that silt from a 13-kilometre bypass canal, left uncleaned for almost thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, made parts of the reserve unsuitable for the deer.
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