Uzbekistan's 5 Ramsar Wetlands and Why They Matter
Uzbekistan's five Ramsar wetlands from the official records: areas, dates, birds, threats, the date mix-up in local releases and the 2026-2030 strategy.
Uzbekistan's National Committee on Ecology and Climate Change says Lake Sudochye joined the list of Wetlands of International Importance in 2023. The Ramsar Convention's own register says 30 May 2022. Both can't be the designation date, and the gap is a good way into a subject that gets very little English coverage: the country's five Ramsar sites, which together cover 739,115 hectares of lakes, reservoirs and reedbeds in some of the driest land in Central Asia.
This guide is built from the Ramsar Information Sheets (the official dossiers each country files), the Ramsar Secretariat's annotated list for Uzbekistan, and the National Ramsar Strategy 2026–2030 published with German support in late 2025. It isn't a how-to-get-there guide: for three of the five sites no reliable visitor information exists.
Five sites, two sets of dates
Uzbekistan became a party to the convention in 2001, and it entered into force for the country on 8 February 2002, according to the Scientific Information Center of the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination (SIC ICWC). Here is the official record set against the years in a 2026 government notice and 2025 press coverage.
| Site (Ramsar no.) | Region | Area (ha) | Ramsar designation | Year in Uzbek releases | Info sheet dated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lake Dengizkul (1108) | Bukhara | 31,300 | 8 Oct 2001 | 2001 | 20 Jan 2003 |
| Aydar-Arnasay Lakes System (1841) | Jizzakh and Navoi | 527,100 | 20 Oct 2008 | 2008 | 27 Jun 2008 |
| Tudakul and Kuymazar Water Reservoirs (2433) | Navoi (Kyzyl-Tepa District) | 32,000 | 19 Aug 2020 | 2020 | 16 Sep 2020 |
| Sudochye Lake System (2522) | Karakalpakstan (Muynak District) | 84,000 | 30 May 2022 | 2023 | 6 Oct 2023 |
| Lake Julturbas (2541) | Karakalpakstan (Muynak District) | 64,715 | 8 Aug 2022 | 2024 | 12 Feb 2024 |
The dates in the Ramsar column are the official ones. The National Committee's World Wetlands Day notice of February 2026 and a December 2025 UzDaily report both give 2023 for Sudochye and 2024 for Julturbas (spelled Zhyltyrbas locally). Those years line up with the dates the two information sheets were published, which is our best explanation; neither release says why. Karakalpakstan's tourism portal adds that Julturbas was announced at the 14th meeting of the Bonn Convention on migratory species, held in Samarkand in 2024. The same page lists Julturbas among five sites but puts their total at 674,400 ha, which is the official total minus Julturbas's 64,715 ha, so its arithmetic leaves that lake out. And SIC ICWC's July 2025 release says "six" sites, then lists five. Five is correct (last checked: October 2026).
The two older sites: Dengizkul and Aydar-Arnasay
Lake Dengizkul, Bukhara Region (2001)
Dengizkul (39°07'N 64°10'E) is a closed saline lake in a natural depression about 70 km south-south-west of Bukhara and 35 km south-east of Alat, on the Turkmen border. It dried out by the mid-1950s after its water was taken for irrigation, and has been refilling since 1966. The 2003 information sheet claims all eight criteria then in use, fish included. Its headline is the White-headed Duck: 1,107 birds in January 2000, which the sheet calculated as 9.6% of the population. The 2025 strategy now says as much as 40% of the biogeographic population spends the winter here, and lists 299 bird species.
The problems are blunt. The Ramsar summary calls gas extraction around and on the lake the main human activity, and the strategy describes unreclaimed wellhead fire sites and abandoned wells nearby. Water is erratic: an oil company built a dam in the north-west in 2012 to hold levels, but no collector water arrived in 2018 and the lake shrank. Salinity reaches 38 g/l in places. Local environmental officials told the strategy's authors that two cold snaps of −15 to −17 °C in the past decade killed at least 4,000 to 6,000 birds. And two sturgeon species named in the original sheet are no longer found there.
Aydar-Arnasay Lakes System, Jizzakh and Navoi (2008)
At 527,100 ha (centred on 40°47'N 67°46'E), this one accounts for about 71% of Uzbekistan's Ramsar area. It is also an accident. In 1969, to cut a Syr Darya flood peak, the Chardara reservoir upstream released between 20 and 21 km³ of water into the Arnasay lakes (the 2008 sheet and the 2025 strategy give slightly different figures). It filled the dry Aydar depression, which broke through to the older Lake Tuzkan and formed one lake system. The site qualified under criteria 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8: threatened species, refuge, more than 20,000 waterbirds, and fish. The 2003 winter count found some 96,600 birds of 37 species, and the strategy counts 311 bird species in the area.
It's also by far the busiest. The strategy records 20,000 visitors in 2022 and 126,500 in 2024, with 25 tourism and recreation places by 2025. Meanwhile the water is getting saltier. Between 2005 and 2023 there were eight years with no freshwater inflow at all, mineralisation hit 8.5 g/l in 2023, and a 2024 survey found that of 5.5 m³/s flowing in the Akbulak collector, only 0.5 reached the lake; fish ponds took the rest.
Tudakul and Kuymazar: Bukhara's water supply
Listed on 19 August 2020, this 32,000-ha site (39°50'51"N 64°49'33"E) sits in Navoi Region's Kyzyl-Tepa District, with Tudakul 23 km from Bukhara according to its information sheet. Kuymazar, dating from 1949, is the chief drinking-water reservoir for Bukhara and Kogon. Tudakul is saltier and used for fish farming; the strategy reports its catch falling from 7,061 tonnes in 2022 to 616 tonnes in 2024.
It met criteria 1 to 6. Winter counts between 2000 and 2020 ranged from 40,320 to 168,533 waterbirds, 229 species have been recorded, Kuymazar has held up to 150,000 Mallards, and more than 1% of the White-headed Duck's biogeographic population winters here. The information sheet rates livestock grazing and canal regulation as high-impact threats. The strategy adds a newer one: holiday bases and recreational boats disturbing birds in spring and summer. It also notes that international birdwatchers visit every year.
The Aral pair: Sudochye and Julturbas
Sudochye Lake System, Muynak District
Sudochye (84,000 ha, 43°29'13"N 58°30'50"E) began as a bay of the Aral Sea and was cut off as the sea retreated. Today the Amu Darya and irrigation canals keep it wet. Its information sheet says it regularly supports 42,063 waterbirds (2002–2021 data), with peak shares of 6.2% for Greylag Goose, 4.3% for White-headed Duck and 2.9% for Greater Flamingo; the Ramsar summary names Greylag Goose, Mallard and Mute Swan as exceeding 1% of their populations. Caracal and Goitered Gazelle are recorded here, and visitors come to see the remains of the settlement of Urga. It met criteria 1 to 6.
Muynak's district administration counted 7,525 tourists in 2022 and 9,845 in 2024, and a survey cited in the strategy found that 75% of tours to Sudochye are built around birdwatching. Drought is the main threat in the Ramsar record. The strategy adds that the area has no waste management system. The same German-funded project that produced the strategy also prepared a management plan and visitor concept for Sudochye.
Lake Julturbas, Muynak District
Julturbas (64,715 ha, 43°30'48"N 59°46'48"E) is another former Aral bay, fed through the Kazakhdarya and drainage collectors. The local name means "shiny water", according to the Karakalpakstan tourism portal. The Ramsar summary credits it with about 25,000 waterbirds a year and at least seven species present at 1% or more of their regional populations, including Ferruginous Duck, Red-crested Pochard and White-headed Duck. Of its 15 fish species, five are Aral endemics, two of them critically endangered shovelnose sturgeons. It met criteria 1 to 7, the only one of the newer sites to qualify on fish.
It is fragile. The lake almost dried out in 2010 and 2014; collectors KS-1 and KS-3, built in 2017, brought water back, but algae has since spread so far that almost no open water is left. Human-caused fires burned tamarisk and reeds three times in five years. Visitors are few: 245 in 2022 and 336 in 2024. Sources disagree on how far the nearest village, Kazakhdarya, is: the information sheet says 17 km in one section and 20 km in another, and the tourism portal says 30 km.
The 2026–2030 strategy and what has changed on paper
This is the country's first national Ramsar strategy, according to the Succow Foundation. The work began with an online seminar on 18 February 2025, organised by the ecology ministry with the Michael Succow Foundation and GIZ. The draft was discussed on 8 July 2025, when SIC ICWC summarised it as four objectives: tackle what drives wetland loss and degradation, run the network of Ramsar sites, promote wise use of all wetlands, and improve implementation. The Succow Foundation reports that Uzbekistan launched it at a side event of the CITES conference in Samarkand on 25 November 2025.
Launched isn't the same as legally adopted. The published text calls its action list "suggested" and expects officials at what was then the ecology ministry to finalise it. A search of the national legislation database, lex.uz, on 7 October 2026 returned 17 documents mentioning Ramsar, and none of them approves the strategy. Two recent ones matter, though. A May 2026 Cabinet resolution approving the 2026–2030 environmental monitoring programme lists the Ramsar lakes among monitored water bodies. And presidential decree PF-122 of 2 July 2026 on fisheries says that from 1 January 2027, reservoirs and lakes will be leased to fish farms through online auctions, but at Ramsar sites and drinking-water reservoirs only traditional fish farming is allowed. That covers all five sites, and it bites hardest at the fishing reservoirs of Tudakul and Aydar-Arnasay.
Visiting: what we can and can't tell you
Our take: two of the five are realistic for an ordinary traveller, two are expedition territory, and one we'd skip. Aydarkul is the easy one, because the desert yurt camps sit near its shore; our piece on sleeping in a Kyzylkum yurt by Aydarkul covers the logistics. Tudakul is close to Bukhara, but we found no official visitor information, so treat it as a birding trip with a local guide rather than a casual outing from your Bukhara base.
Sudochye usually appears as a stop on multi-day jeep trips to the Aral shore, the kind described in our Ustyurt Plateau expedition guide; the wider story of the sea is in our article on efforts to restore the Aral. Julturbas is expedition territory at best: 336 recorded visitors in 2024 and no public access information, so don't plan a trip around it. Dengizkul is the one we'd skip: it sits in a working gas field area, and we found nothing official on visiting it. For seasons, species and eBird tips, the Uzbekistan birdwatching guide is the better place to plan, and the Ramsar annotated list for Uzbekistan is worth downloading for the official summaries (last checked: October 2026).