Uvs Lake Basin is an endorheic basin located on the territorial border of Mongolia and Tuva, a republic of the Russian Federation. The basin is part of the Central Asian Internal Drainage Basin and is named after Uvs Lake , a large saline lake situated in the western part of its drainage basin. Uvs Lake is a shallow lake with an area of 3,350 km2 . Its entire basin, which includes several smaller lakes, is 70,000 km2 .Uvs Lake Basin may also refer to Ubsunur Hollow , which is the western part of the drainage basin, or to over 10,000 km2 of protected areas covering the lake and its surroundings. The hollow forms the northern part of the Great Lakes Depression, which has a surface of over 100,000 km2 . The hollow, and most of the drainage basin, are situated in the Khövsgöl, Zavkhan and Uvs Provinces of north-western Mongolia, and the Mongun-Tayginsky, Ovyursky, Tes-Khemsky and Erzinsky Districts of southern Tuva. The basin is part of a combination of raised lands and hollows located throughout the Tannu-Ola and Altai mountainous regions. Here, the world's most northern desert meets the Northern Hemisphere's most southern tundra zone. An area of 10,560 km2 , around three quarters of which lies in Mongolia, was designated Biosphere Reserve in 1997, and a partly overlapping zone of around the same size was designated UNESCO World Heritage in 2003. The Mongolian part of the lake and its immediate surroundings were further adopted as Ramsar wetland in 2004.
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