Raziyeh Doreh gar zavareh
Grade:
Graduated
Determining Priority Areas for Ecological Restoration in Khojir National Park
Abstract:
Khojir National Park i earest park to Tehran metropolitan and one of the most valuable natural ecosystems in Iran. This park is known as Tehran’s respiratory system. Notwithstanding, these ecological values, human activities including road construction such as Parchin–Pasdaran road, construction of Jihad research centre, military aggression and seizinghave been increasing and the ecological impacts of these disturbances have become highly visible in Khojir national park. Forreducingthe damage caused by human activities,ecological restoration has been identified, which is the process of habitat restoration that aims to regain ecological integrity and enhance human wellbeing in degraded landscapes. The main objective of this study was to assess the ecological priority areas in Khojir National Park in order to the conservation of biodiversity.In this study, spatial prioritization for restoration was done for formulating scenarios to indicate where restoration investments will have maximum pay-off. It was because ecological restoration costs money, both in terms of direct costs (staff, purchase of vehicles and other costs), and in terms of the opportunity costs associated with the land allocated for restoration and conservation. In the area of priority setting, analysis using geographic information systems (GIS) provides a useful means of integrating the many different types of information that need to be taken into account. For this study, using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) structure problem solving was formed, and then the database contains criteria layers was established. The criteria were divided into two main groups: 1) biophysical criteria and 2) disturbances, then criteria importance was obtained with poll from experts and was analyzed using Expert choice software.As the criteria were i wide range of different scales, therefore it was necessary that each of the criterions would be standardized before combination.The parameters were standardized by fuzzy sets.Once the standardized factor images have been created, a set of weightshave been developed that indicate the relative importance of each factor to thedecision under considerationusing weighted linear combination.Among all the sub criteria, distance from roads received the highest weight.The priority final map for ecological restoration was produced in five left.