Investigation the Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Hyrcanian Forests, Iran

Protected areas (PAs) are considered as the main tool to protect biodiversity worldwide. However, due to the insufficient facilities and equipment, in practice, many PAs fail to achieve their basic conservation goals. Therefore, evaluating and ensuring the effectiveness of PAs to protect biodiversity, especially in biodiversity hotspots, and for their long-term conservation and management. The Hyrcanian forest is one of the ancient deciduous temperate and pristine forests in Northern Hemisphere, is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its unique diversity of flora and fauna. However, due to the expansion of human development, these forests is threatened by various human activities. Then, assessing human threats is of paramount for better implementation of management policies in the region.

We obtained red deer (Cervus elaphus maral) census data from the Iranian Department of Environment. We also conducted direct interviews with rangers across PAs in the study area. Moreover, we extracted land use change data (i.e., forest cover and cropland) for two decades (1989-2018). We applied a generalized linear model to analyse our data and selected our best models based on Quasi-Akaike Information Criterion corrected for small sample size (QAICc) approach.

Our results show that the forest cover and cropland in two time points (years 1988 and 2018) across PAs did not significantly differ. Our results further showed that ~ 747 individual maral (95% CI = 604-980) were counted across 21 regions, indicating a decline of 59% compared to 1988 across PAs. These results show that positive and significant impact rengers on the abundance and population structure of red deer (β = 0.26, 95%, CI ( 0.15-0.38), Relative importance =1), On the other hand, the results indicate that protected areas with good yields have a significant contribution to maintaining biodiversity in the Hyrcanian forests.

In line with the studies, it is suggested that protected areas focus on security for the presence of species and try to improve habitat conditions for valuable species by increasing the enforcement of laws.