The wildlife of Turkey is abundant and diverse.

Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...

is a large country with many geographic and climatic regions and a great diversity of

plants Plants are the eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars f ...

and

animals Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia (). With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a ...

, each suited to its own particular habitat. About 1,500 species of

vertebrate Vertebrates () are animals with a vertebral column (backbone or spine), and a cranium, or skull. The vertebral column surrounds and protects the spinal cord, while the cranium protects the brain. The vertebrates make up the subphylum Vertebra ...

s and 19,000 species of

invertebrates Invertebrates are animals that neither develop nor retain a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''spine'' or ''backbone''), which evolved from the notochord. It is a paraphyletic grouping including all animals excluding the chordate subphylum ...

have been recorded in the country. Some of the world's staple crops were first cultivated in this area and many of their wild relatives are still found here. The country acts as a crossroads for many birds during migration, connecting Europe, Asia, and the Near East.

Biomes and ecoregions

Flora

Fauna

Threats

Threats to biodiversity include

desertification Desertification is a type of gradual land degradation of Soil fertility, fertile land into arid desert due to a combination of natural processes and human activities. The immediate cause of desertification is the loss of most vegetation. This i ...

due to climate change in Turkey, which is forecast to move the ecoregions northwards, and large scale infrastructure projects such as those near Istanbul.

Land degradation Land degradation is a process where land becomes less healthy and productive due to a combination of Human impact on the environment, human activities or natural conditions. The causes for land degradation are numerous and complex. Human activitie ...

threatens

biodiversity loss Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in Biodiversity, b ...

, and

water scarcity Water scarcity (closely related to water stress or water crisis) is the lack of fresh water resources to meet the standard water demand. There are two types of water scarcity. One is ''physical.'' The other is ''economic water scarcity''. Physic ...

is also a problem. Küre and Kaçkar Mountains National Parks have been suggested for

rewilding Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also d ...

. Several marine fish and mammals have greatly declined, in part due to overfishing.

Policy

Turkey enforced the

Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats Bern (), or Berne (), ; ; ; . is the '' de facto'' capital of Switzerland, referred to as the " federal city".; ; ; . According to the Swiss constitution, the Swiss Confederation intentionally has no "capital", but Bern has governmental i ...

from 1999, but according to one study laws and legal decisions still had some deficiencies in 2019, especially regarding migratory species and international coordination. The government plans to increase protected areas from the 9% in 2019 to 17% by 2023. Official restrictions on access to environmental information hamper biodiversity monitoring. In 2020 it was suggested that more use of

remote sensing Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an physical object, object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring inform ...

and

citizen science The term citizen science (synonymous to terms like community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is research conducted with participation from the general public, or am ...

could help to make the first complete map of the nation's land cover.

References