Abstract: In the environmental legislation of the Russian Federation, designed to regulate public relations about nature, the concept of nature protection is a priority.
Lake Baikal is a territory with special conditions of use, with unique natural characteristics and a powerful system of ecological and legal regulation of public relations in the field of environmental protection. For effective planning and regulation of economic activity in the coastal territories of Lake Baikal, it is advisable to involve an ecological and legal mechanism for environmental protection, which allows unambiguously determining the priority right to use the territory, relying on environmental legislation and protecting the rights of nature in resolving conflict situations. The use of the legal environmental zoning tool, which significantly enhances the ecological and legal mechanism by means of cartographic visualization, implemented with the involvement of geoinformation systems, allows us to simultaneously display the effect of all regulatory and legal restrictions on a specific area of the territory. This makes it easy to navigate the legislative space manifested on the ground, taking into account the characteristics of the territory, determine the priority right to use the territory and find the optimal permitted option for conducting permitted activities. So, on the example of the Slyudyansky district of the Irkutsk region, a comparison of the categories of legal zoning with maps of real use of resources was carried out, which clearly showed contradictions in real and permitted use. The visual implementation of the ecological and legal mechanism and the possibility of improving environmental management is shown, through the introduction of a mechanism that allows to identify violations in the regulated use of the territory in an operational mode, ensuring safe rational use of natural resources through the search for the optimal use of different areas of the territory.