Background: Mountain-Forest ecosystems provide essential services within the economic system of the region and perhaps the country. These natural resources, which have many apparent or not apparent functions, are facing economic development pressures in recent years. The benefits of water provided by mountain-forest ecosystems to the downstream basin and the benefits of eliminating the adverse conditions created by rainwater are economically valuable. However, they are benefits that decision-makers often do not consider. With quality and rational forest management, these benefits can be gained much more publicly. Forest rotation, silviculture studies, economic value determination, and rational forest management taking all these into account can provide this.
Methods: The Faustmann approach made essential contributions to natural resource management and especially to the economic analysis of mountain-forest ecosystems in the middle of the 19th century. Highlighting the importance of the forest area's regeneration process, Faustman gave important opinions to decision-makers about when the timber value will be suitable for rotation. Hartman developed the Faustman approach by stating that the forest area has not only timber value but also non-timber values. In this study, the function of providing water resources from the Uludag National Park (UNP) resource values examined both approaches; and three models were created.
Results: The basic model where only the timber value is taken into account is the model in which the impact of the rain flow regulation service on the UNP rotation is analyzed, and all forest water services are taken into account. Here, it was taken into account that the increased water quality value due to the forest will increase by 10%. According to the first model results, the UNP must be subjected to rotation at intervals of 44 years. UNP reaches its current net value of 956 USD/Ha in 44 years. In the second model, in which the service of eliminating problems such as floods, landslides, and landslides may occur in settlements below the basin due to the retention of rainwater in forest soil, there was no effect on the rotation period. However, the stand value increased to 976 USD/year per hectare. The third model assumed that the water quality value increased by 10%; It was concluded that the rotation increased to 107 years, and the stand value per hectare this year is 147 006 USD/Year.
Conclusions: The study has made important contributions to the literature. It integrates the natural resource value determination studies with the forest rotation system. Also, essential implications are made for regional decision-makers and UNP forest management. It was concluded that the necessity of increasing the business investments made to the UNP is how important the allocation, use, and development decisions of the UNP are.