A Participatory and Spatial Multicriteria Decision Approach to Prioritize the Allocation of Ecosystem Services to Management Units

Abstract

Forest management planning can be challenging when allocating multiple ecosystem services (ESs) to management units (MUs), given the potentially conflicting management priorities of actors. We developed a methodology to spatially allocate ESs to MUs, according to the objectives of four interest groups—civil society, forest owners, market agents, and public administration. We applied a Group Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support System approach, combining (a) Multicriteria Decision Analysis to weight the decision models; (b) a focus group and a multicriteria Pareto frontier method to negotiate a consensual solution for seven ESs; and (c) the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system to prioritize the allocation of ESs to MUs. We report findings from an application to a joint collaborative management area (ZIF of Vale do Sousa) in northwestern Portugal. The forest owners selected wood production as the first ES allocation priority, with lower priorities for other ESs. In opposition, the civil society assigned the highest allocation priorities to biodiversity, cork, and carbon stock, with the lowest priority being assigned to wood production. The civil society had the highest mean rank of allocation priority scores. We found significant differences in priority scores between the civil society and the other three groups, highlighting the civil society and market agents as the most discordant groups. We spatially evaluated potential for conflicts among group ESs allocation priorities. The findings suggest that this approach can be helpful to decision makers, increasing the effectiveness of forest management plan implementation.

Assessing the Dynamics of Forest Ecosystem Services to Define Forest Use Suitability

“…These aspects of EMDS promote interactive collaboration between scientists and end-users, making it suitable for participatory planning. Additionally, EMDS facilitates the integration of expert knowledge and scientific methods, particularly through the weighting processes and evaluation of criteria and network relations (Marques et al 2021;Acosta and Corral 2017). In this study, the weights and parameters were assigned through the participatory process, based on previously gathered datasets.…”

Quantitative methods for integrating climate adaptation strategies into spatial decision support models

“…Doing so provides the broader context with which to evaluate possible future trajectories and outcomes from management, thereby enabling managers to account for the complexity of interacting ecological and social factors acting within landscapes. Furthermore, PROMOTE model outputs can be used within a multi-criteria decision (Marques et al, 2021) or optimization (Ager et al, 2017) modeling framework to assess tradeoffs and synergies among strategic planning options. Such models help resolve complex decision-making problems where there are multiple resources of interest and varying priorities among interest groups to consider.…”

Representative Group Decision-Making in Forest Management: A Compromise Approach

“…The availability of participation tools could be of great interest when solving problems associated with forest management [36]. In this work, the weights obtained in different ways could be applicable in a forest management exercise that includes the objectives considered.…”