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Public participation has become an important driver in increasing public acceptance of policy decisions, especially in the forestry sector, where conflicting interests among the actors are frequent. Stakeholder Analysis, complemented by Social Network Analysis techniques, was used to support the participatory process and to understand the complex relationships and the strong interactions among actors. This study identifies the forestry training sector stakeholders in the Western Italian Alps and describes their characteristics and priorities, in relation to training activities on entrepreneurial topics for forestry loggers. The hierarchy among actors has been identified, highlighting their respective roles and influence in decision-making processes. A lack of mutual communication among different and well-separated categories of actors has been identified, while good connections between stakeholders, operating in different territories, despite the presence of administrative and logistical barriers, have been observed. Training is a topic involving actors with different roles and interests. Nevertheless, all actors consider training about how to improve yields of forest operations and how to assess investments, particularly in innovative machinery, to be crucially important and conducive to a better comprehension of the wood supply chain and the enhancement of the raw material.

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Biological invasions represent an increasing threat to ecosystems worldwide, with negative ecological and socio-economic impacts, whereas risk assessment and management remain challenging. The development of decision support systems (DSS) has the potential to help decision-makers and managers mitigate invasive species, but few DSS exist for forest invasive alien species (FIAS). The use of DSS in forestry is not new but they represent an asset in decision making in times of increasing complexity of issues foresters face and factors to consider. Yet, few forest DSS address the problem of FIAS. In this review, we identify key elements of the FIAS risk-assessment and management decision-making process, discuss these elements with a model-based DSS development perspective, and summarize outstanding challenges and opportunities for FIAS DSS development. FIAS DSS should not only estimate the probability of FIAS invasion but also consider forest vulnerability and quantify exposure (i.e., value at risk), while allowing different threat scenarios and possible solutions to be compared. Such a complete risk assessment and management calls for integrative modelling approaches that explicitly link different components of FIAS invasion, management, and impact assessment into a DSS. Such integrative modelling is challenging and may require collaboration among experts of different domains. International collaboration is also needed to facilitate data exchange, as the lack of data is one of the main challenges. In many cases, data and ecological knowledge of invasive species are too limited (in quantity or quality) to constitute useful input to DSS or their components (e.g., species distribution model). Another challenge is to better consider the multiple sources of uncertainties inherent to modelling invasions (e.g., host preferences and behavior, forest vulnerability, potential impacts, and cost and benefits of mitigation actions) when assessing FIAS risk and communicating results from risk assessment. Communication with stakeholders and DSS end-users, in fact, appears as one of the keys to successful DSS development and appropriation, not only to ensure that they correspond to end-users’ needs but also to ensure ease of use, functionality, and good visualization of DSS outputs.

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