Flora and Fauna Conservation in Machakhela National Park Georgia

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation is the protection and management of biodiversity to obtain resources for sustainable development. The diverse topography and climate has provided conditions to develop a remarkably wide array of landscapes and plant formations. They include two features of plants and plant associations that date back millions of years: the Colchic refugium in the eastern Black Sea basin and the Hyrcanic region on the southern Caspian Sea coast. These “refugia”/refugial forests harbour many locally endemic plants - species that are found nowhere else. They include relict and endemic oaks (such as Quercus imeretina, Q. hartwissiana), Medvedev’s birch (Betula medwedewii), Ungern’s and Smirow’s rhododendrons (Rhododendron ungernii, R. smirnowii) in the Colchic. Machakhela National Park is located 30 km away from Batumi in the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus. Close to the Turkish border, Machakhela expands the protection of the unique ecosystems of the Colchic forests – rich tropical and sub-tropical habitats (temperate rain forests with peat bogs) which contain unrivaled biodiversity, and are rich in relics of the tertiary period: Colchic bot box, chestnut, nut, hazel-nut, and bot trees abound. Trails are being developed and since this park has only been recently established, you can still be one of the first to witness its wet beauty. At the same time these unique forests can mostly be classified as temperate rainforests, due to the same principal reasons as for other temperate rainforest regions: relevant slopes of barriermountains located along coastlines that trap a large portion of the humidity from sea air masses. Montane barriers also contribute to a warm and humid climate that has been present since the late Tertiary and is the primary reason that the Caucasus has acted as a shelter for humid- and warm-requiring (hygro-thermophilous) relicts during the ice age.