Determined is that the Baikal region is gaining importance due to the initiatives of the Silk Road. Since the Baikal basin has a special nature management regime, information support in the form of large cartographic atlases of complex content is to play a primary role in studies of acute and complex problems of ecologically and economically balanced development of the Baikal region, in solving these problems and in managing this development. The paper proves the need for new methodological tools for analyzing, structuring and integrating environmental-geographic information into a single integrated and multi-level atlas information system of the Baikal region. It is shown that in order to make optimal management decisions, there is a need in an infrastructural approach to the integration of territorial information and computing resources based on the Internet, a service-oriented paradigm, Web technologies, and the implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium standards for Web services is needed. Three atlases of the Baikal region are considered. The first of them is the Ecological Atlas of the Lake Baikal Basin, published in 2015 in Russian, Mongolian and English languages and was made publicly available on the Internet on the geoportal of the Baikal Information Center. The second — “Ecological Atlas of the Baikal region” placed on the geoportal of the Institute of System Dynamics and Control Theory of the SB RAS in 2017. Since 2017 we are working also on the atlas “Baikal Region: Society and Nature”. The structure, content and methodological features of the preparation of all three atlases are analyzed.

International experience in developing and generating the ecological atlas of the transboundary region, the Lake Baikal drainage basin, is provided. We examine the conceptual and organizationalmethodological principles, the technique and practical results of mapping the natural and anthropogenic factors that are responsible for the ecological situation, the current state and transformation of the environment and its protection, and the present status of human health of a large region. We discuss the issues related to cartographic representation of the ecological conditions and factors along the shores and across the water area of Lake Baikal as well as to the incorporation of the thus produced atlas into the Internet.

We outline the methods and results of cartographic analysis and assessment the present state of a large region's geosystems: their structural, functional and functional-value characteristics have been revealed. Drawing on the notion of epiformations, we determined the ecological potential of geosystems at the regional level for nature management purposes. A fragment of the typological general-purpose interpretation map "Ecological potential of the Baikal region's geosystems" is presented.

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