Main image: Tatarbunary Steppe. Odessa Region / Photo: Maksym Yakovlev, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ukraine ranked second in the number of uploaded photos among all 57 participating countries in the "Wiki Loves Earth" competition.
The organizers of the photo competition "Wiki Loves Earth" selected the ten best photos of Ukraine's natural heritage in 2024. These photos represent various protected areas across Ukraine’s regions and showcase the beauty of Ukraine's nature, according to the press service of the NGO Wikimedia Ukraine.
Olesya Lukaniuk, a member of the national competition's organizing committee and the manager of the international part of "Wiki Loves Earth," shared that the nature landmarks competition began in Ukraine in 2013 and has been held globally since 2014 to collect photographs of Ukraine's protected areas for illustrating Wikipedia articles.
"To date, nearly 60% of the sites from the competition list have been covered. This means the project continues to be relevant and significant in expanding this list, especially in the current context—when we see the substantial losses to natural landmarks," Olesya Lukaniuk noted.
This year, the competition was held for the second time during Russia’s full-scale invasion, but despite safety restrictions, Ukraine secured second place for the number of photos uploaded among all 57 participating countries. A total of 106 participants uploaded 6,437 photos of Ukraine's protected objects.
The ten best photos from Ukraine included images taken in the Odessa, Lviv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Zakarpattia, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Zhytomyr regions, and the currently occupied part of the Kherson region.
