A group of foreign travelers and researchers from Canada, England, Scotland and Australia are visiting the Golestan National Park in northern Iran to study rare tulips and other flowers that grow in the park during the spring season.

Description (source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre)

A mountainous area with temperate rain forest ecosystems, lush steppes, scrub woodlands, high rocky cliffs, hills, undulating terrain and lotic and lentic ecosystems (rivers, springs and marshes). The variety of habitats in the area has led to considerable flora and fauna richness in the park. This beautiful area and its various sceneries is the oldest national park in the country which has been protected since 1956. Today this park faces serious problems and urgent measures to solve them are not adopted, and other similar representative examples are not protected as sort of protective support, it will not keep its values even the mid-term ones.

This park, based on the articles 77-79 of the World Heritage Conventions, is a certainly Threatened area.

The reasons are as follows:

• The park's surrounding lands have been totally deforested and allocated to other land uses. Today the park is an island confined by the farming lands.
• The illegal hunting in the recent years has severely increased and one can hardly see the big herd of the wild life.
• The over use of recreation zones by the people has severely destroyed all the zones of the recreation; so did the floods in the recent years.

• The Asian highway has divided the park through. In the recent years, the ministry of roads taken action to change the roads and build high flood-breaking concrete walls to control the last years' interminable floods. These walls has divided and fragmented the park and completely destroyed its integrity, organic and unique links.

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Related Site: Belorussian translation by Martha Ruszkowski

... Payvand News - 04/13/11 ... --