UNESCO Biosphere Reserves are environment-protected scientific-research institutions of international status that are created with the intent for conservation in a natural state the most typical natural complexes of biosphere, conducting background ecological monitoring, studying of the surrounding natural environment, its changes under the activity of anthropogenic factors.
Biosphere Preserves are created on the base of nature preserves or national parks including to their composition territories and objects of other categories of nature-preserving fund and other lands as well as including in the established order the World Network of Biosphere Reserves in the UNESCO framework "Man and the Biosphere Programme".
The focal point in Poland for the Biosphere Reserves is the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS),
Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation.
Reserves
There are currently ten such reserves in Poland, including trans-boundary reserves shared between Poland and neighboring countries.
- (Reserve POL 01) Babia Góra, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, , designated 1976, extended in 2001
The reserve is located on the border with Slovakia in the Western Beskidy Mountains. Babia Góra is the second highest massif () in Poland and forms part of the watershed boundary between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea basins. There are four environments that occur as the altitude increases. The forest belt is divided into a lower belt (up to ), consisting of forests of European beech (Fagus sylvatica), silver fir (Abies alba) and Carpathian spruce (Picea abies), and the upper belt (up to ) consisting of Carpathian spruce forest. Above the forest is the subalpine belt (up to ) with dwarf mountain pine (Pinetum mughi) and low-growth European blueberry (Vaccinium myrtillus). At the highest slopes is the alpine grassland belt (up to ) consisting of lichen-covered siliceous bedrock with tussock-based grasses like (Festuca supina) and (Avenella flexuosa).
- (Reserve POL 02) Białowieża Forest, Podlaskie Voivodeship, , designated 1976
The reserve, in northeastern Poland, lies adjacent to the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Biosphere Reserve in Belarus. The forest complex, the last and largest remaining mixed deciduous primeval forest on the North European Plain, is situated in the transition between the hemiboreal and continental climate areas. The forest is composed of a mosaic of diverse communities, principally composed of grey willow (Salix cinerea), European hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), arctic dwarf birch (Betula humilis) English oak (Quercus robur), small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata), Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), Norway spruce (Picea abies), which reaches its southern limits in the northern hemisphere here, and sessile oak (Quercus petraea), which reaches its northeastern limit here.