Prioritizing the Importance of Non-Governmental Collections in the Protection of Biosphere Reserves Using TOPSIS (Case Study: Golestan National Park)

Golestan National Park is the oldest registered national park in Iran and a unique sanctuary for wildlife. This area was registered as one of Iran's Biosphere Reserves by UNESCO in 1957. Different non-governmental sectors play a role in the protection of this park, and the purpose of this study is to prioritize the importance of their role in its protection. For this purpose, participatory indicators of preventing forest destruction, educating local communities, extinguishing fire, dealing with predators, preventing the entry of livestock, preventing fire, cleaning the environment and performance scores for non-governmental groups, non-governmental organizations, nature partners and local communities with The use of the questionnaire was investigated, and the weight of each index was calculated using Shannon's entropy, and finally, the importance of each influential community in park management was prioritized using the TOPSIS model. In this study, the high importance of participatory indicators of forest destruction prevention, cooperation with environmental department, dealing with illegal hunters and environmental cleaning in park management were obtained with weights of 0.337, 0.187, 0.145 and 0.112, respectively. The results also show the high importance of non-governmental organizations with a weight of 0.87 in the participatory management of the park, so that local communities and nature partners were placed in the next priorities with weights of 0.36 and 0.06. Since the park, with its large area and special regional conditions, is affected by environmental and human tensions, according to the results obtained from this study, it can be said that non-governmental organizations and communities