Mark H. Johnson

organisation KuzeyDog ̆a has for the past few years led studies of the carnivores in northeastern Turkey. With the first wolf-tracking project in Turkey, the research showed that these predators move much more widely than the confines of the protected areas. Within just two months they covered an area that was 13 times larger than the national park where they were caught and fitted with GPS/GSM transmitters that textmessage the wolves’ GPS coordinates to the researchers’ cell phones. After three years of persistence, in 2011, KuzeyDog ̆a succeeded in convincing the government of the idea of creating wildlife corridors to connect these protected areas. The first such corridor was officially agreed with the Ministry of Forest and Water Affairs in December 2011 and publicly announced in June 2012. With a length of 82 kilometres, it will link the isolated Sarıkamıs ̧ -Allahuekber National Park in the Kars region to the large Caucasus forests on the border with Georgia. With a surface area of 23,500 hectares and official status of ‘Protected Forest’, the corridor will be marginally larger than the national park itself. “This corridor will provide additional habitat for large carnivores, will connect their isolated populations, and hopefully will also help reduce the local human–carnivore conflict,” S ̧ ekerciog ̆ lu writes. “As Ardahan’s Posof forests are connected to Georgia’s Akhaltsikhe forests that border the 85,000 hectare Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park, Turkey’s first wildlife corridor will also promote transboundary conservation in the region.” Two thirds of the area of the corridor is already covered by forests. The government agencies will carry out reforestation work to fill the gaps, which may take up to a decade, and hire park rangers for the protection of the area. Meanwhile, KuzeyDog ̆a will keep lobbying the politicians to ensure that the corridor is established as promised, and will also continue to study the ecology of the area, thus also providing a live coverage of the efficiency of the conservation measures, and to inform the public about the measures and the importance of the regional biodiversity. Further wildlife corridors could drastically improve the value of the existing areas. “We are already talking with the ministry officials about an even bigger wildlife corridor connecting the forests on the Black Sea coast,” S ̧ ekerciog ̆ lu says. “This region is mostly forested, so a thousand mile corridor crossing Turkey from Georgia to Bulgaria is not as difficult as it sounds. We also want the government to include all of Sarıkamıs ̧ ’ remaining 400 km2 of forest inside the boundaries of Sarıkamıs ̧ National Park, not just a token 60 km2.” It looks like environmentalists in Turkey will have a lot of work to do for the coming years.