Browsing by Author "Altunel T."

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Beekeeping as a rural development alternative in Turkish Northwest
(2019-01-01) Altunel T.; Olmez B.
Turkey is one of the best areas for beekeeping because of its geography, climate, and the diversity of flora and fauna. Beekeeping is a traditional and socio-economic activity which is performed throughout Anatolia and has a place in our culture. Besides this, bee-keeping is very important to protect biodiversity and pass it onto the next generations, and also to provide and enhance food security. There are more than 100,000 families with 6.6 million colonies in Turkey. With all those, bee-keeping contributes to Turkish economy around US$ 5-6 billion, not only through bee products but also pollination. As a part of the national policy, ORKÖY (the office of forest-village relations) provides micro-credits to villagers, who live in and around forested areas. In this study, ORKOY branch office distributed 30 beehives to 80 villagers with beekeeping certificates (in 2016 and 2017) and let them put their hives in the “honey forest” which was established in the region by the Forest Directorate. Face-to-face surveys, interviews and observations were conducted with 80 participants who benefited from beehive support and “honey forest.” At the end of the study, socio-economic effects and welfare improvement of local people through beekeeping and producing of bee products are analyzed in the northwest of Turkey.
Determining the habitat fragmentation thru geoscience capabilities in Turkey: A case study of wildlife refuges
(2021-07-01) Altunel A.O.; Caglar S.; Altunel T.
Technical forest management started 180 years ago in Turkey, during which time there have been various approaches and policy changes. The primary objective of forestry has been considered as timber production, so the intangible benefits have never been given the proper attention they deserve. The majority of Turkey’s wildlife has prospered within the forest ecosystems. This situation has gradually led to a change of status, so some forests and land areas have been reassigned with the conservation agendas as the primary purpose; however timber production has never slowed down. Thus, operational forestry practices, such as roading, logging, etc., have kept on exploiting these lands to their full extent despite their conservation statuses. In Turkey and anywhere else, since forestry has always evolved around extracting the timber out of the forest lands, the accessibility has long been provided, building roads to take related services to forested ecosystems. The remnants of these roads, along with the more standardized new ones can be found everywhere, regardless of the land status. Such expansion has resulted in habitat fragmentation emerging as a major threat for the protected areas. In this study, the expansion of all-weather and dry-weather accessible roads and suburban spread was examined in two adjacent, Ilgaz and Gavurdagi, wildlife refuges for the years of 1960, 1993, 2010 and 2019, relying heavily on the mapping, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. It was found that 275.5 km dry-weather roads in 1960 rose to 700 km in 2019, which meant 254% increase. Additionally, when the core along with the surrounding 3000 m buffer area was considered, 51 km all-weather roads in 1960 increased almost four and a half times by 2019. Suburban expansion was relatively stable inside the core area but had almost quadrupled within the surrounding areas, exposing the refuges to more people. These findings indicated that the wildlife habitats of Turkey are fragmented and under heavy human pressure.
Examining the PALSAR-2 Global forest/non-forest maps through Turkish afforestation practices
(2020-08-17) Altunel A.O.; Akturk E.; Altunel T.
Forests and afforestation have significant importance, given the present course of World’s climate resulting from our insensitive behaviours, policies, ambitions, etc. Turkish Forest Service has departments, sole purposes of which are to combat desertification through afforestation, flood control, and watershed rehabilitation works. Majority of the works is carried out in the semi-arid central part of the country, which is known as the Irano-Turanian phytogeographic region. Hydroelectric dam projects, which have extensively been conducted to produce energy and to harness the rivers when needed, have been at the centre of these efforts in the region. Afforestation works, which have long been used to safeguard dam reservoirs, have always been associated with such projects because they are implemented even prior to water deposition. They along with the country’s managed forests are looked after as the natural forest cover. Improvements in remote sensing at this point enabled the agencies to diversify their efforts in monitoring the natural resources and strengthening the decision makers’ hand in management preferences in both global and regional scales. There are various data produced through the classification of satellite imagery representing the existence or the percentage of forests in any location on Earth. In this study, Global Phased Arrayed L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar PALSAR-2/PALSAR mosaic and forest/non-forest maps of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Global Forest Cover Change (GFCC) thematic image tiles of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which are two of the widely accepted such data, were compared to one another and to our control results produced by a pixel-based classification method to assess the performance of afforestation works around seven major hydroelectric dam reservoirs situated within the central part of Turkey. The results showed that Global PALSAR-2/PALSAR forest/non-forest maps were somewhat capturing the trend, but overly exaggerating the ground facts up to 1064%. GFCC epochs, on the other hand, did not yield sound results in this semi-arid part of Turkey. Latter data could not even capture the successfully afforested sites.