Cold Winter Deserts of Turan
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How it came to be
The Cold Winter Deserts of Turan are fourteen component parts in the arid temperate zone of Central Asia between the Caspian Sea and the Turanian high mountains, shared by Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Their very cold winters and hot summers support a diverse flora and fauna adapted to harsh conditions, across desert ecosystems spanning more than 1,500 km from east to west.
One component, the Barsakelmes reserve, was once the largest island in the Aral Sea. In August 1848, as part of Alexey Butakov's survey of the Aral Sea, the geographer A. Maksheyev and the topographer A. Akishev made the first recorded survey of the island, and the poet Taras Shevchenko made the first sketches of its plants and animals. As the sea shrank, the island joined the mainland in the 1990s.
At Repetek in Turkmenistan the Russian Geographical Society set up a sand-desert research station in 1912, and a reserve was founded on its basis in 1928. Saiga antelope, kulan and goitered gazelle make seasonal migrations across the deserts. The three states signed a memorandum on joint management on 10 January 2022, and in 2023 the property, covering 3,366,441 ha, was inscribed on the World Heritage List.
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