Investigating the attitude of forest dwellers regarding the management of preservation and protection of natural resources in Guilan province

The purpose of this research is to investigate the attitude of forest-dwelling villagers towards forest management, their satisfaction with the way forests are managed, and the level of people's participation in forest administration and natural resources management.

The statistical population of the research including 50 individuals was selected randomly from among the villagers of the villages on the edge of the forests using the Delphi survey method. The questionnaire included nine main topics of natural resource management and 59 executative indicators. The validity of the items was confirmed through the Lavache relationship and the reliability of the research options was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha test. For each index, the product of the average importance was calculated based on the 5-point Likert scale in the normalized weight of the index.

The result of the Kruskal Wallis statistical test showed that there is no significant difference between the experts of 4 selected cities in terms of executive indicators of natural resources and forest management. According to the results of this research, the level of satisfaction of local experts with the functioning of the core activities of the Natural Resources Custodian in Gilan province was declared to be weak. The topics of protection and conservation, education, people's participation for forest administration and protection have the most impact and value. In exploitation, the most value was given to wood farming activities, local exploitation and tourism capacity. The indicators of forest protection and preservation in line with management, the most important factors of forest destruction were valued. Satisfaction with all indicators of restoration and reconstruction of damaged forests (5 indicators) was at a low level. In terms of the effectiveness of the index of people's participation in fire fighting, the activities of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) for the protection and maintenance of natural resources and the reporting of cases of destruction of natural resources by people (people's participation in forest protection) and handling all public reports, were ranked first to third, respectively.

The attitude of the local forest-dwelling leaders towards the performance of the forest administration and natural resources management shows moderate to low satisfaction, which is necessary to be improved by increasing the participation of local communities, the positive impact of the projects on the livelihood of the forest-dwellers and strengthening the implementation measures toward protection, restoration and reconstruction and principled exploitation.