The National Park Kytalyk located in Yakutia in the basin of the lower Indigirka River reaches has been added to the Tentative List of the Russian Federation. This opens up the opportunity to prepare the nomination for inclusion of Kytalyk in the UNESCO World Heritage List this year.

The territory of the Park with an area of 1,885,554 hectares can be recognized as unique on a global scale by a combination of two criteria of outstanding universal value: ix (processes of evolution and development of ecosystems), and x (biodiversity/threatened species). The Park is rich with reference tundra landscapes considered by the IUCN being of potential outstanding universal value in terms of criteria ix and x. In addition, the Park territory is the breeding ground of a huge number of birds that mainly use the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Among them is the Siberian crane Eastern population, the critically endangered representative of the world's avifauna.

The application for inclusion of Kytalyk in the Tentative List has been prepared by the staff of the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Natural Heritage Protection Fund, who will participate in the preparation of the nomination dossier this year.

The application for inclusion of the National Park Kytalyk in the Russian Tentative List is available on the World Heritage Centre site: http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6520/