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Visim Nature Reserve is a Russian 'zapovednik' protecting an area of southern taiga in the low Middle Ural Mountains. in 2001, it was named a UNESCO MAB Biosphere Reserve. It is named for the ancient village of Visim, which was home to the Russian writer Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, who wrote about rural life in the Urals. Most of the reserve is located on its western slope in the headwaters of the Sulёm River, a right tributary of the Chusovoi River, part of the vast Volga-Kama basin. Part, however is on the eastern slope in the Ob River watershed. The reserve thus straddles the Europe-Asia continental divide: water from the reserve flows into both the Caspian Sea through the Volga River, and the Kara Sea through the Ob River. The reserve is situated in the Kirovgrad District of Sverdlovsk Oblast, about 100 km northwest of Yekaterinburg.TopographyThe Visim Reserve has a terrain that is mostly low mountains with conifer forests. The core reserve is roughly rectangular, 20 km across, with much larger buffer zones (where hunting and fishing are prohibited) to the north. The eastern part of the reserve is low mountains with relative heights of 250 to 300 meters, and a maximum height of 700 meters above sea level. The delineated biosphere includes the core region of Visimskiy (33,487 hectares), plus a buffer zone extending north for 46,000 hectares, and a transition zone extending for a further 100,000 hectares north.
