Servizi ecosistemici delle foreste calabresi: la percezione degli stakeholders

Ecosystem services in forests of Calabria: stakeholders' perception. In the last decades, the ecological, economicand social analysis of benefits provided by ecosystem to society has coved a great importance in thescientific international literature. The main studies focuses on three aspects: ecosystem services potentialsupply, demand and use. The potential supply is defined as the ecosystem biophysical capacity to supplyservices, while the demand represents the amount of service desired by the society. The third aspect considersthe current use of a ecosystem service in order to satisfy the social demand. This study focused on theevaluation of social demand on ecosystem services provided by forests at local level (Calabria region) underthe project "ALForLab". The main objective of the present study is to analyze the stakeholders' opinions andpreferences of forest sector in Calabria Region about relevance of forest ecosystem services and categories ofecosystem services. The study, conducted in four areas (Pollino, Sila, Catena Costiera and Serre Calabre),was structured in three steps: (i) identification and classification of stakeholders (stakeholder analysis); (ii)administration of a questionnaire to the previously identified stakeholders; (iii) statistical analysis of the datacollected by questionnaire. Stakeholders' opinions and preferences were analyzed in order to highlight thedifferences between study areas and groups of stakeholders. At the end of the stakeholder analysis, 320 stakeholderswere identified and contacted, 71 of whom filled in the questionnaire (response rate of 22%). Theresults show that the two main categories of ecosystem services are the supporting services and regulatingservices. According to the stakeholders' opinions the three most important forest ecosystem services are: biodiversity,landscape and hydrogeological protection. Landscape is particularly important because it is stric -tly linked to the cultural value and social identity of a territory. This survey show that the characteristics andpeculiarities of each study area are the main factors that influence the stakeholders' preferences on single elementsof the landscape. In the study areas characterized by a high natural value (Pollino, Sila and Serre Calabre)the stakeholders consider the natural elements of the landscape (forests and water bodies) as the mostimportant, while in the most urbanized study area (Catena Costiera) the anthropic and cultural elements havea key importance. Finally, the stakeholders consider the forest fires, the illegal cuttings and the forest managementabandonment the three main important threat factors to forests functionality in Calabria.