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Turkey
Agro-Forestry
Cutting Fodder
Notable Cedar |
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Key Contacts:
The ATF seeks a person to act as a link person to groups and ancient
tree activity in Turkey.
Contact us if you would like to know more.
Ted Green and Jill Butler visit Turkey:
Trees and Turkey 2010
Turkey is a large country, over 3 times the size of the UK with a
population of 72.5 million. We travelled from Antalya on the Mediterranean
coast to Istanbul experiencing a range of areas. For much of the trip we
were over 1000m in altitude and going up to 2000m for the mountain visits.
Turkey is very keen to join EU and is therefore actively aligning
conservation policies and protection measures with EU. It is already a
Ramsar signatory
A tension exists between managing land for biodiversity and managing for
access, and in some cases people are excluded or access is by permit only,
although there is not always a strong conservation case for this (similar to
GB NNRs in 19602-70s). And there are usually no staff to implement any
controls so it’s not always obvious. The archaeological artefacts are
stunning and all over the place and very accessible.
Turkey both from a biodiversity and cultural perspective is fascinating
because of its geographical location. It has been overrun by everyone in
history (including a minor blip of the Crusaders). There is also an amazing
diversity of fauna and floras from three different continents.
Acknowledgements:
We were extremely lucky to have Prof. Dr Mustafa Avci as our guide for 4
days of our trip as he was able to arrange off road vehicles to travel up
into the forest. Without access provided by the Turkish Environmental and
Forestry Service (Çevre ve Orman Bakanlığı) we would not have seen as much
or learnt as much as we did.
Mustafa is based in the Forestry Faculty at Süleyman Demirel University, the
fourth largest university in Turkey.
Route and full itinerary pdf (2MB) |
