Investigating the driving forces affecting on forest land-used change in Golestan province based on the opinion of experts and protection forces

Deforestation and land-used changes of forest is considered as a global crisis that have had a growing and worrying trend. A considerable area of ​​land has been affected, especially due to changing natural forest to agronomy land used. In this regard, the present research was conducted with the aim of analyzing the influencing factors of forest land use change in Golestan province based on the opinion of experts and conservation forces. The population studied in the current research includes experts, forces of the natural resources protection unit and forest rangers in Golestan province, of which 100 people were selected as a sample. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire, the validity of which was tested using the opinions of natural resources experts. Its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS25 and Smart PLS3 software. Results showed positive and significant effect of driving forces including “weaknesses of livelihood of Local Communities and high dependence to forest resources”, “human activities and damages of natural disturbances”, “organizational and managerial weaknesses”, and “weaknesses of laws and regulations and their implementation gaps (at 1% level) and unbalanced development of economic activities (at 5% level) on land-used change of forested areas in Golestan Province. The findings indicated that land-used changes of Golestan’s forest had the most to the least effected by "illegal exploitation", "foundation and construction development" and "smuggling of wood and non-wood products". According to the obtained results, suggestions and practical solutions were presented in order to prevent the land-used change of forest.