Abstract
Urban forests are becoming more critical as climate-induced disasters and disturbances tend to increase and affect cities. Forest managers are the responsible technical people on the ground to implement forestry-related climate policies. There is limited knowledge on the capacities of forest managers related to climate change issues. In this study, we surveyed 69 forest district managers of 28 provinces and compared their responses with actual data to understand their perceptions of urban green areas and climate change issues. We used a set of digital maps of the 1990–2015 period to identify land cover changes. To calculate the urban forest cover in the city centers, we used the city limit delineation shapefiles produced by the EU Copernicus program. We also employed the land consumption rate/population growth rate metric and a principle component analysis (PCA) to identify and discuss the provinces’ land and forest cover changes. The results showed that forest district managers were aware of the general condition of the forests in their provinces. Still, there was a considerable inconsistency between actual land use changes (i.e., deforestation) and their responses. The study also revealed that the forest managers were aware of the increasing influence of climate change issues but were not knowledgeable enough to establish the connection between their tasks and climate change. We concluded that the national forestry policy should prioritize the urban-forest interaction and develop the capacities of district forest managers to improve the efficiency of climate policies on a regional scale.
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Data availability
We used three data sources in this study. The survey performed toward the forest managers has been done online, and the results are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
We used Copernicus programs Urban Atlas database to delineate urban centers. The shapefiles are open to the public and available online.
The land cover datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Erda Çeler has done the survey preparation, statistical analysis, and leading authoring. Yusuf Serengil performed the geographical information systems work and checked the analysis results to support Erda Çeler. Ufuk Özkan contributed to the interpretation of the results and editing.
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Çeler, E., Serengil, Y. & Özkan, U. A comparative assessment of forest/green cover and the awareness of forestry district managers. Environ Monit Assess 195, 520 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-11146-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-11146-4