The thesis is devoted to defining the essence and features of the administrative and legal principles of supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use, and reproduction of forests in Ukraine, as well as the development of proposals and recommendations aimed at improving administrative legislation in the relevant field and optimising the entities whose activities are aimed at for the implementation of this control and supervision activity.
It has been argued that the protection, conservation, use, and reproduction of forests in Ukraine, as objects of supervision and control, represent a set of social legal relations related to the management of forestry, aimed at ensuring the ecological sustainability of the forest as an important element of the environment, as well as "places" of forestry activities. Each of the listed elements is interconnected because, for example, the use of the forest is impossible without compliance by the forest users with the requirements for compliance with the specified limits of extraction of forest resources, which contributes to their reproduction. Meanwhile, forest users are obliged to comply with the requirements for the protection and conservation of forests, and any deviation from them may entail negative consequences in the form of legal liability. And therefore, the above certainly makes the protection, conservation, use, and reproduction of forests an important object for supervision and control.
It has been proven that supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use, and reproduction of forests is a type of management activity in the field of environmental protection, part of which are forests as a renewable natural resource. Its matter is the activity of specially authorised entities, which is aimed at implementing a set of measures aimed at checking, evaluating, and ensuring compliance by all entities that carry out their activities in the field of forestry (primarily, owners and forest users) with legally established requirements for protection, conservation, rational use, and reproduction of forests, as well as in the direction of prevention, detection, and termination of violations of forest legislation.
It has been established that the features of supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use and reproduction of forests are: firstly, the volume of requirements that are the subject of supervision and control depends on the administrative and legal status of subjects participating in forestry, because there are different requirements for the scope of obligations towards state authorities, local self-government bodies that represent the interests of the respective forest owners, private forest owners, temporary special forest users, as well as entities that carry out general forest use; secondly, the presence of a large number of subjects who exercise control and supervisory powers in the field that is under consideration, which in a certain way leads to the increase, "duplication" of supervision and control on the same issues by different state institutions; thirdly, the existence of a wide range of issues that constitute the subject of supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use and reproduction of forests.
It has been determined that the key place in the system of legal frameworks for supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use, and reproduction of forests in Ukraine belongs to the norms of administrative law. The above is explained by the fact that precisely with the help of administrative and legal regulatory acts: firstly, the legal status of forest owners and forest users is established, and therefore, the limits of their permissible and necessary behavior are determined, which in their entirety constitute the subject of supervision and control in the researched field; secondly, the administrative-legal status of subjects authorized to carry out control and supervision activities in the researched area is determined; thirdly, the forms, methods, as well as the limits of supervision and control are revealed; fourthly, the list and content of administrative procedures for the supervision and control of protection, conservation, use and reproduction of forests is established.
It has been established that the tasks of supervision and control over the protection, conservation, use and reproduction of forests in Ukraine are: inspection and evaluation of the activities of entities using forest resources; ensuring compliance with the regime of legality in the field of protection, conservation, use and reproduction of forests; detection and termination of violations of forest legislation; bringing persons who have committed offenses in the field of forest resource use to legal responsibility; prevention and cessation of illegal logging, poaching and any other negative impacts on the state of forests; ensuring sustainable and responsible use of forest resources.
