Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
49th World Congress of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, IFLA 2012, Cape-Town, Güney Afrika, 5 - 07 Eylül 2012, ss.616-628
Transportation infrastructure continues along thousands of kilometers and shapes the natural areas by surrounding them or cutting them at least two pieces. "Landscape fragmentation" has many detrimental ecological effects on habitats and populations. Some of the animals avoids roads, some have collisions with vehicles and some are able to traverse the roads without any accidents. Divided populations, isolated habitats and the reduced sizes of these small remnants threat the persistence of wild life populations. Additionally, roads introduce chemical contaminants and exotic species in these natural areas, and also interrupt the ecological processes. Turkey is unique by being located between Europe and Asia and being at the junction of 3 global biodiversity hotspots: Mediterranean, Caucasus and Irano-Anatolian. Only 4.64 % of Turkey is protected. In addition, there are 305 Key Biodiversity Areas (comprise 26 % Turkey land area), which are not protected yet. KBAs are selected by using standard, globally applicable criteria considering the distribution and population of certain species groups: Mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, freshwater fish, butterflies, dragonflies and plants. Key Biodiversity Areas are also considered the susceptibility of habitats to fragmentation in species context. This study focuses on the landscape fragmentation in the protected areas (national parks and wild life reserves) and key biodiversity areas of Turkey. Effective mesh size, which described as the landscape connectivity metric is used in this study. 71.06% national parks, 64.74% wildlife reserves and 97.33% of key biodiversity areas have landscape fragmentation. Protection status is not enough to protect areas from landscape fragmentation since the applications don't correspond with the requisitions of protection status. Responsible bodies should regard the roadless areas, and they should improve regulations to protect roadless areas against constructing roads. And also mitigation measures should be applied within the fragmented protected areas to maintain the species persistence within their last refuges.