Assessment of rangelands degradation factors using path analysis (Case study: Haraz rangelands, Mazandarn province)

The program to stop destruction of natural resources at the national level as a strategy requires a detailed understanding of the effective factors and determining the contribution of each of them, therefore this study was undertaken for further clarifying. Thus, viewpoints of natural resources experts were chosen in order to investigate and prioritize the effective factors on rangelands degradation in Mazandaran province. The statistical population of this research was comprised of natural resource experts that 50 of them were selected randomly. The main tool for data collection was a questionnaire that was designed to measure the variables influencing the rangelands degradation based on Likert scale with five options ranging from very low to very high. Questionnaire validity was attained by specialists’ views after correction and revision. Reliability of the factors influencing the rangelands degradation was assessed by a pretest with viewpoints of 30 experts from natural resources based on Cronbach's alpha coefficient and the mentioned coefficient was obtained as 0.761 which indicates the high reliability of the questionnaire. In inferential statistics the Friedman test was used to compare the ordinal variables and Path analysis was used to investigate the relationships between variables. The results of Path analysis show that the most indirect effect is related to the number of utilizers and the most direct effect is related to land-use change from rangelands to agriculture. Total of direct and indirect effects suggest that primarily the change of land use to agriculture has the greatest effect on rangelands degradation and after land-use change, drought has an important direct effect on rangelands degradation.