Modeling the Effect of Environmental Factors on the Diversity of Vegetation in Central Alborz Protected Area

Different forms of land use development and human activities in protected areas are considered to be the main drivers of change, which have many effects on habitats, habitats, diversity and richness of species. The purpose of this research is to model the effect of human activities on the diversity of vegetation using the artificial neural network method and determine the impact of ecological and human variables on them. This research was done in the Central Alborz protected area under the management of Alborz Province. To achieve the mentioned purpose, firstly, 101 plots and 101 soil samples were collected and, soil and vegetation analysis were performed on the samples. Finally, using the multilayer perceptron neural network method and using 18 input variables including physical and chemical variables of the soil, physiographic variables, and human factors variables , the effect of human activities on the diversity of vegetation in the study area modeled. According to the results, the vegetation diversity model with the structure of 1-5-18 according to the highest value of the coefficients of determination in the three categories of training, validation, and test data is equal to 0.82. 0.81 and 0.68 show the best structure optimization performance, distance from roads, electrical conductivity, and percentage of organic matter in the soil show the greatest effect on the diversity of vegetation in the study area. The model presented in this research is used as a decision support system in evaluating the effects of human activities on the diversity of vegetation in protected areas and provides the possibility of predicting the extent of these effects on the diversity of vegetation in these areas.