Use of ecological value analysis for prioritizing areas for nature conservation and restoration

Abstract

Many studies made in recent years revealed the fact that nature conservation and restoration practises have been required in our forests, whose natural structure has been degraded or destroyed by anthropogenic interference, containing a high level of biodiversity and situated in three different phyto-geographical regions. Considering the recent developments on these subjects mainly in Europe and North America, it is necessary to carry on nature conservation and restoration studies by applying different planning methodology for various landscape types. It was aimed with this study to develop a new planning concept for determining nature conservation and restoration priority areas based on the basic principles of "ecological value analysis", which is widely used today in many developed countries. Yedigoller National Park (Bolu) was selected as study area. Ecological value analysis was performed with the assessment of data collected from 80 sample plots related to 16 parameters, which are the rarity of plant communities and their spatial distribution, hemeroby degrees, diversity and rarity of plant taxa, endemic plant taxa, some components of forest structure (layerness, stand age, mixture type, mixture rate, canopy closure) and deadwood amount by using relation matrices and direct scoring. The results revealed that; (1) there is a rather variable landscape structure depending on naturalness, diversity of habitats, species diversity, rarity and endemism, (2) 90% of the study area has "medium" ecological value, (3) detailed ecological value scale scores ranges between 15-30, (4) anthropogenic disturbance is mainly determined in the area close to the lakes, (5) use of many parameters as possible considering the landscape structure improved the sensitivity of the analysis as well as providing the sophisticated analysis of the study area.