VISUAL LANDSCAPE CHARACTER OF ORIENTAL SPRUCE (Picea orientalis (L.) LINK.) MOUNTAIN FORESTS IN TURKEY


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Eroglu E., ACAR C.

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING AND LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT, cilt.19, sa.3, ss.189-197, 2011 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

Özet

Oriental Spruce forests in Turkey have gained greater importance in forest management in recent years. Oriental Spruce is one of the most important species distributed in the north-eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey and Caucasia as a colchic element. It forms the main structure of the "forest landscape", affecting the landscape character of the region's mountains regarding with its distributions and land use. In this proceeding, the visual landscape character of Oriental Spruce mountain forests was tried to be determined in selected areas of the north-eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey. In this study, in order to determine visual character of mountain forest and assess the process of forest functional planning or landscape planning, some landscape areas were categorized by some criteria such as plant species composition, variety, colour, mass-void, edge, geomorphologic units, rocky, roadside, etc. in forest panoramas of the region. Conducting a participated approach to determine landscape character of forests and using slide show, the preferences were determined by semantic factors (naturalness, variety-complexity, unity, fascination, vividness, meaningfulness). As a result, the landscape character types of mountain forests were discussed, that is integrated to forest or landscape management regarding sustainability of forest visual resources as well as ecological and silvicultural characteristics.