ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. For. Glob. Change
Sec. Forest Management
Ranking landscape-level management planning scenarios based on stakeholders' interests and ecosystem services performance
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
- 2Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Lisbon, Portugal
- 3US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Washington, United States
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Balancing multiple forest management objectives requires integrating ecological, economic, and social priorities among diverse stakeholders with conflicting interests. This study aims to evaluate and rank landscape-level management planning scenarios in Vale do Sousa, a region in northwestern Portugal, according to stakeholders' preferences through a hybrid decision-support framework that combines optimization and participatory approaches. Five management scenarios were developed using linear Programming (LP), each maximizing (or minimizing) a single ecosystem service. Stakeholder preferences, elicited through an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) survey, in which 25 participants weighted stand-level forest management models and associated ecosystem services. These weights were incorporated into a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) implemented in Criterium Decision Plus (CDP). The results show that stakeholders' preferences strongly influence the ranking of landscape-level scenarios. The scenario maximizing timber production ranked highest under stakeholder-weight evaluations, whereas maximizing wildfire resistance emerged as the top-ranked under equal weighting conditions. These findings demonstrate the value of integrating stakeholder-informed preferences with optimization-based scenario evaluation. This study is among the first to integrate AHP-based stakeholder preferences with LP optimization to rank landscape scenarios.
Keywords: Forest decision support systems, Participatory modeling, Optimization-based evaluation, analytical hierarchy process, Multi-CriteriaDecision Analysis, Strategic forest planning
Received: 17 Sep 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Poudel, Rodríguez-Fernández, Reynolds and Marques. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Srijana Poudel, srijanapoudel@isa.ulisboa.pt
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