It has been widely recognised that the participation of different groups of people is crucial to urban forest management. This paper aimed to focus on the motivating factors and conditions that foster participation in urban forest management. Also, the main constraints which limit participation were explored. Therefore, a survey using a researcher-designed questionnaire was used to gain information from forest visitors. Exploratory factor analysis was used to categorise all the effective factors and constraints into summarised factors. Using a principal component analysis, it was found that the most important factors encouraging participation in urban forestry were health and environment improvement and involvement spirit. These two factors explained about 60% of citizens' participation variance. The constraints also were categorized into four categories namely "lack of legal support", "lack of cooperation spirit", "lack of motivation" and "lack of time and awareness". The stepwise regression model with socio-economic features and factors affecting citizens' participation in forest management also showed that five variables, namely health and environment improvement, having a child, involvement spirit, lack of motivation and income were predicting 45.1% of the effective factors on citizens' participation. The results suggest that to enable more participation of citizens, the legislative structure should change and institutional support increase. In addition, motivation, particularly economic and increasing awareness are necessary for attracting citizens to participate in forest management plans.

The issue of participation has recently become an interesting point for many national, regional and international institutions. Participation and collaboration of Iranians in the field of natural resources conservation has an old history. During a long period of time, vast areas of natural resources have been protected by the dwellers and indigenous users; we are witnessing deep land use changes in the fields of natural resources so that we can observe its negative impacts in different places because of changes in the traditional systems of exploitation, decentralization, lack of appropriate alternative participatory system, population growth, poverty and lack of adequate knowledge of users,. It is while, the villagers and forest's inhabitants, play an important role in managing of natural resources particularly in forested areas. It is because they have an indigenous knowledge which can be used in the process of natural resources management. Among Iranian forests, Arasbaran Region has a significant ecological value for the whole country as well as regional ecosystems. Hence, for protecting the forests of this region, people participation is inevitable. For an appropriate participatory forestry in this region, first of all there must be an adequate awareness about inhabitants of region. For this purpose, many methods such as PRA or RRA can be used. In the present research, Arasbaran forested region was investigated and people collaboration and participation with respect to the developing and protecting of forests of the region were analyzed using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Accordingly, this research tried to spotlight the people participation in the protection of natural resources. The results revealed that, expanding people’s participation in this field depends on informing local people, decentralizing management process, reducing poverty, facilitating and improving the participation mechanism