Macedonia, officially the Republic of Macedonia, is a country in the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991. It became a member of the United Nations in 1993, but, as a result of an ongoing dispute with Greece over the use of the name Macedonia, was admitted under the provisional description the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a term that is also used by international organizations such as the European Union, the Council of Europe and NATO.
Allandlocked county, the Republic of Macedonia has borders with Kosovo to the northwest, Serbia to the north, Bulgaria to the east, Greece to the south, and Albania to the west.

 

The country’s geography is defined primarily by mountains, valleys, and rivers. The capital and largest city, Skopje is home to roughly a quarter of the nation’s 2.06 million inhabitants. The majority of the residents are ethnic macedonians, Albanians form a significant minority at around 20 percent, followed by Turks, Romani, Serbs, and others.

 

 

 

 

The country has three National parks:

Flora

The flora of Republic of Macedonia is represented by around 210 families, 920 genera, and around 3,700 plant species. The most abundant group are the flowering plants with around 3,200 species, followed by moses (350 species) and ferns (42).

National Park of Pelister in Bitola is known for the presence of the endemic Macedonian Pine, as well as some 88 species of plants representing almost 30 percent of Macedonian dendroflora. The Macedonian Pine forests on Pelister are divided into two communities: pine forests with ferns and pine forests with junipers. The Macedonian Pine, as a specific conifer species, is a relict of tertiary flora, and the five-needle pine Molika,  was first noted on Pelister in 1893.

 

 

 

 

Fauna

The fauna of Macedonian forests is abundant and includes bears, wild boars,wolves, foxes, squirrels, chamois and deer.. The linx is found, although very rarely, in the mountains of western Macedonia, while deer can be found in the region of  demir Kapija. Forest birds include the  blackcap, the grouse, the  black grouse, the imperial  eagle and the forest owl.

The three artificial lakes of the country represent a separate fauna zone, an indication of long-lasting territorial and temporal isolation. The fauna of Lake Ohrid is a relict of an earlier era and the lake is widely known for its letnica trout, lakewhitefish, gudgeon, roach, podust, and pior, as well as for certain species of snails of a genus older than 30 million years; similar species can be found only in  lake Baikal. Lake Ohrid is also noted in zoology texts for the European eel  and its baffling reproductive cycle: it comes to Lake Ohrid from the distant Sargasso Sea,  thousands of kilometres away, and lurks in the depths of the lake for 10 years. When sexually mature, the eel is driven by unexplained instincts in the autumn to set off back to its point of birth. There it spawns and dies, leaving its offspring to seek out Lake Ohrid to begin the cycle anew.