Middle East
Of all the regions the Middle East is the most sparsely forested (Map 1) . Only five forest types were represented, all being non-tropical. Countries which would have been included in this regional analysis if we had had the data for them are listed in Appendix 1. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were covered in the Europe region. This will be rectified so that they are included in the Middle East in future versions of these studies.
The forests of Turkey are concentrated in the areas near the coasts of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea and are of the sclerophyllous dry type. Those of Iran are of the same type and are concentrated in the highlands south of the Caspian Sea. Afghanistan's forests are concentrated along the eastern border, near Pakistan, around the Khyber Pass. These forests are different than those in Iran and Turkey (Map 1). Elsewhere forest cover is very sparse, the only other small concentration being in north eastern Kazakhstan.
Much of the Middle East is in non-forest ecological zones, which explains why there is so little forest in the region (Map 2) . The cool temperate forest zones occur where the sclerophyllous dry forests of Iran and Turkey occur. A vast area is covered by three cool temperate non-forest zones, making up most of the area of Kazakhstan and a significant proportion of Uzbekistan. Turkey and Iran also have large areas covered by one or other of these zones, and much of the south east of the latter is in desert or desert bush zones.
Turkey had by far the most forest of any country in the region (Fig. 2, Table 1), but had only 1.2% of these protected. Afghanistan, Iran and Kazakhstan had relatively similar forest amounts (Fig. 2), but the latter two countries had some under protection whereas Afghanistan had zero percent protected. The other countries in the region all had percentage forest protection figures of less than 1%.
The most abundant forest type in the region was sclerophyllous dry (Fig.1), but only 3.6% of this was under protection. All percentage protection figures were low, 7.4% for deciduous broadleaf forest being the highest. Deciduous needleaf forest was the least abundant forest type, and this occurred only in the eastern extremity of Kazakhstan (Map 1, Table 2).
Afghanistan's forests were divided between evergreen needleleaf forest and mixed broadleaf/needleleaf forest (Table 2). Of all the countries in the region, Afghanistan was the only one where the latter occurred, so protection of this should be examined as a regional priority. The forests of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey were all of the sclerophyllous dry type. Those of Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were a combination of deciduous broadleaf and evergreen needleleaf. Kazakhstan was the only country in the region that had more than two forest types, and at least a certain amount of each was protected.
The ecological zones that contained most forest were the cool temperate steppe and the cool temperate moist forest (Fig. 3). These were only minimally protected. Only five of the zones had percentage protection figures of more than 10%, and ten zones had less than 1% of their forests protected.
The least abundant forest type in the region, deciduous needleleaf forest, occurred in seven ecological zones but was only somewhat protected in two of these (Table 3). In the zones where it was most abundant there is none under protection: polar wet tundra and boreal moist forest. As indicated above this forest type was confined to Kazakhstan and should be protected in these zones. All other forest types occurred in twelve or more ecological zones, but there were many zones where the forests were not under protection.
In an attempt to impartially indicate natural, undisturbed forest variants which may be under the most immediate threat of destruction, a list was drawn up that pinpointed those under 100 km2 in extent with none protected. These are variants of relatively limited extent and which do not even have any legal protection; possibly much less actual protection. Some of these forest variants may indeed be truly rare and unprotected types, others are clearly fragments of forest at the end of their ranges, as for example certain types of dry forest should not normally occur in moist ecological zones, or vice versa. An in-depth analysis of these forest variants is outside the scope of this study. There were 9 of the 66 variants in the Middle East that met these criteria, and these are listed below (T=tropical forest type, N=non-tropical forest type):
Eight of the 28 zones in the region were more than 10% forested, the highest figure being for boreal wet forest (24%) (Table 4). In general the forest ecological zones were between 7 and 24% forested except the subtropical dry forest zone which was only 4% forested. With the exception of the polar wet tundra which was 8% forested, the non-forest zones (desert, steppe, tundra, bush) were 5% or less forested. Only 7 of the 28 zones had enough protected forest for it to register as greater than 0%, and all of these figures were less than 4%.
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