Golestan National Park

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.

Satements of authenticity and/or integrity

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.

Comparison with other similar properties

The situation of Golestan National Park has the farthest east points of Hyrcanian flora has brought it under severe influence of Irano-Turanian flora while increasing its species richness. In this regard its superior to the pure Hyrcanian flora, that is Gilani and Mazandarani, but under other hand it has caused the park not to be regarded as Hyrcanian representative example, because some Europ- Siberian elements of Hyrcanian flora are absent in the Golestan National Park. To enrich the ecological richness of the park, it is necessary to select and protect some intact area in the western part of the park such as a part of Jahan Nama and Chelcheli  protected area as National parks. These Two zones are considered as the protecting support for Golestan National Park. In addition so many of species (flora and fauna) at the park has been deprived of due to its situation such as Caspian Snowcock ,Eurasian Lynx and forest communities such as beech, yew, petrocarya be protected in this area and the chain of the protected Hyrcanian representative examples be completed.