**Section 1**

**Landscape Planning** 

**1** 

**Protected Areas** 

*Namk Kemal University, Faculty of Agriculture,* 

Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation. They are the cornerstones of virtually all national and international conservation strategies, set aside to maintain functioning natural ecosystems, to act as refuges for species and to maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes. Protected areas act as benchmarks against which we understand human interactions with the natural world. Today they are often the only hope we have of stopping many threatened

The original intent of the IUCN Protected Area Management Categories system was to create a common understanding of protected areas, both within and between countries. This is set out in the introduction to the Guidelines by the then Chair of CNPPA (Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas, now known as the World Commission on Protected Areas), P.H.C. (Bing) Lucas who wrote: "*These guidelines have a special significance as they are intended for everyone involved in protected areas, providing a common language by which managers, planners, researchers, politicians and citizens groups in all countries can exchange information and* 

*"An area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means"*

Protected areas can be categorized into six types, according to their management objectives

*Protected area managed mainly for science or wilderness protection (I(a) Strict Nature Reserves, and* 

An area of land and/or sea possessing some outstanding or representative ecosystems, geological or physiological features and/or species available primarily for research and/or environmental monitoring. A wilderness area is a large area of unmodified or slightly modified land and/or sea retaining its natural character and influence without permanent or significant habitation which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural condition.

*views*" (The International Union For Conservation of Nature [IUCN], 1994).

or endemic species from becoming extinct (Dudley, 2008).

IUCN defines a protected area as:

(IUCN 1994).

*Category I* 

(IUCN, 1994; 2003):

*I(b) Wilderness Areas).* 

**1. Introduction**

*Department of Landscape Architecture* 

Murat Özyavuz

*Turkey* 
