Integrating Ecosystem Services into Valuation and Forest Management Decisions

Dear Colleagues,

It is well known that forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including provisioning services (wood, firewood, fruits, etc.), cultural services (recreation, knowledge, etc.) and regulating services (water and climate regulation, among others). Therefore, ecosystem services include goods and services, with and without markets. Both the marketed and the non-marketed goods and services should be incorporated into forest management making processes in several ways. Regarding the non-marketed ones, the economic valuation by using revealed and stated preference methods (travel costs, contingent valuation, choice experiments, among others) has showed as useful tools for forest management decision-making. Therefore, forest management requires a good knowledge on both the ecological and economic processes. Despite of these arguments most of the technical and scientific information generated along the last few decades seems not being correctly incorporated into forest decision processes. For all these reasons, this Special Issue encourages studies from several fields, including economic valuation applications, methodological issues, qualitative approaches, decision making issues, etc., in order to promote knowledge on how to incorporate the ecosystem services into valuation and forest management decisions. In addition to this, we would like to receive studies that promote the integration of different ecosystem services into forest management decision making processes through quantitative models, chiefly mathematical programming with single and multiple criteria in deterministic and non-deterministic scenarios.

Prof. Dr. Luis Díaz-Balteiro
Dr. Mario Soliño
Guest Editors

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