Biodiversity Monitoring Programme in Konya and Karaman has been completed
Ankara - The "Sustainable Land Management and Climate Friendly Agriculture" project carried out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) carried out the Biological Diversity Monitoring Program Online Final Workshop.
Through this study, it was integrated into the Farmer Field School Biodiversity Monitoring Program, which is the first FAO approach in Turkey. In addition, with this program, the biodiversity of not only the conservated areas but also the land uses in the project areas will be monitored. Another important point of this program is the development of a protocol in which the roles and responsibilities of the relevant institutions at the regional level are determined.
The meeting started with the opening speech of Peter Pechacek, FAO Forestry Officer and Project Leader. Pechacek underlined the following points in his speech. “This study was an exemplary study in terms of providing a management/governance protocol, which will be very beneficial for us to see which organization is responsible for what in monitoring practices, in addition to the technical success in monitoring. Also, tracking is not complete with a single loop. The first monitoring cycle establishes a reference for future studies, and future monitoring based on this reference point will more clearly show positive and negative trends. This study will provide us with that.”
The opening speeches continued with the speech of Beytullah Fidan, Deputy General Manager of the General Directorate of Combating Desertification and Erosion. Fidan said, “Turkey is a country with three phyto geographies that contain many ecosystems. As a result of this situation, it is both a transition point and one of the critical countries in terms of biodiversity. We have over 12,000 species and over 5,000 endemic species." said. In his speech, Fidan emphasized that the Biodiversity Management Plan made within the scope of the project and this monitoring study are very valuable for revealing the current situation of Turkey's biodiversity, taking a healthy inventory, protecting and developing it, and transferring it to the next generations. He also underlined that this study determines the standards for how monitoring should be done and that it will be useful for revealing trends in biodiversity in the future, just as it is in monitoring desertification and erosion.
The meeting continued with the presentation of Yıldıray Lise, Deputy General Manager of the Nature Conservation Center. Lise gave detailed information on the Biodiversity Monitoring Program. In the last part, the animated film containing the biodiversity studies carried out within the scope of the project was shown to the participants and their comments were received.