Mapping forest ecosystem services perception for landscape planning: the case of Collemeluccio-Montedimezzo Alto Molise Biosphere Reserve, Central Italy

Forest ecosystems provide fundamental benefits to people. Over the last centuries, the interactions between human and natural systems shaped Mediterranean forest landscapes. More recently, abandonment phenomena and environmental changes (land use changes and climate) strongly reduced the biodiversity and determined a partial erosion of ecosystem services. As a consequence, landscape planning is now called to recover resilience and stability of such complex systems. In this way, Biosphere Reserves are experimental areas for the landscape planning, which is oriented to valorize participatory processes and maintain the interactions between local communities and the surrounding forests with an adaptive approach. This work is aimed at mapping the forest ecosystem services perception in the Collemeluccio-Montedimezzo Alto Molise Biosphere Reserve, in order to understand the linkages between ecological, economic and socio-cultural features for improving landscape planning. At first, the values of ecosystem services perception were correlated to environmental attributes (e.g., slope, aspect, tree cover, net primary productivity, etc.). Secondly, a multi-criteria analysis was carried out to identify the most influencing factors on ecosystem services perception. Finally, forest ecosystem services hotspots were identified as priority areas of intervention for adaptive landscape planning. Generally, results revealed that linking qualitative and quantitative information through a robust approach improves the effective implementation of landscape planning. Moreover, our approach can be considered as a model system to include the participation of communities in decision-making processes at landscape scale, as it can be easily replicated in other Mediterranean contexts with similar characteristics