Monitoring thirty years of land cover change: Secondary forest succession in the Artvin Forest planning unit of Northeastern Turkey

Abstract

As a major topic in forest ecosystems, determining plant successional changes is crucial to understanding the vegetation dynamics, composition and environmental disturbance of forest landscapes. This study is designed to evaluate the consequences of human and natural impacts on changes in secondary forest succession land cover from 1972 to 2002 in the Artvin Forest Planning Unit, in NE Turkey. This paper also contributes to the development of a framework for effective conservation of biodiversity through forest management plans by using successional stages and land cover types. Secondary forest succession stages and land cover types were determined according to Clementsian theory and mapped with Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies through aerial photos and high resolution satellite images (IKONOS). The results indicated that the forest area in 1972 and 2002 was 88% and 80%, and the number of forest patches were 106 and 222, respectively. While the total road length in the Forest Planning Unit (FPU) was 67.7 km in 1972, it was 130.0 km in 2002, an increase of 62.3 km. Results show that urbanisation, industrial development and dam construction, together with unregulated forestry activities with clear-cut as well as insect outbreaks, affected the secondary forest succession and fragmented the forest ecosystem in the study area. Determining the secondary forest succession in detail is necessary for the sustainable management of such fragmented forest areas and for the preparation of biodiversity-friendly integrated forest management plans.

Key Words:

• Disturbance
• forest management
• GIS
• remote sensing
• stand maps

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend thanks to the General Directorate of Forestry, Turkey; INTA SPACE TURK, Karadeniz Technical University, Faculty of Forestry, Department of Forest Management staff and Kafkas University, Faculty of Forestry, Department of Forest Management staff for valuable discussions related to the development of this manuscript. They would also like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful reviews of this manuscript and the editor of SGJ for a detailed edit of the manuscript.