Digital identification of ecosystem structure in the Fırtına Valley of the Kaçkar Mountains in the Rize City of Turkey

Abstract

Identifying the structure of protected mountain ecosystems is an important task for understanding conservation sustainability. The study area, the Firtina Valley, located in the Rize City on the Eastern Blacksea Coast, is one of the biological hotspots and a National Park of Turkey. In order to identify the structure of mountain ecosystems, we generated a GIS database for the main environmental parameters of the study area, including elevation, slope and aspect layers for topographic structure, 10 year mean values of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), data for vegetation structure, annual mean temperature and precipitation layers for climatic structure, main soil groups for soil structure and stream flow accumulation, stream flow length and stream order layers for hydrological structure .To identify the complex relations among environmental factors in the study area a data reduction method is applied with Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA is performed using data of 16 layers from Geographical Information Systems (GIS). PCA analysis reduced 16 dimensions into 5 dimensions containing 75% of the variation in all data. It is also revealed that the topographic structure, mainly altitude, dominates the ecosystems of the Firtina Valley, but it should be considered that the interactions of environmental factors in an ecosystem dynamics are very complex. The ecosystem structure is determined by the environmental factors direct or indirect effects on energy regulation of an ecosystem. Therefore the relationship between topographic elements and other abiotic-biotic elements in the Firtina Valley are important for environmental assessment and sustainability of a protected area, and these effects are explained in this study.