Urban forests play a vital role in maintaining the city ecological balance and providing ecosystem services to citizens. Ecosystem services lead to better quality of life, better environmental quality, and more sustainable urban growth. However, many emerging nations have often progressed at the price of lowering and sacrificing forest coverage, which has a negative impact on the benefits that the public receives from natural green spaces. As a result, the goals of this research were to ascertain visitor impressions of urban forests in Kuala Lumpur, to assess the value assigned by visitors to urban forests in Kuala Lumpur, and to investigate the elements that impact the willingness to pay. A questionnaire-based field study was conducted on a total of 254 respondents among Taman Tugu Urban Forest visitors, Kuala Lumpur. The results show that visitor perceptions of regulating services, cultural services, and supporting services were positive, with high-level score values of 4.74, ±0.40, 4.69, ±0.37, and 4.70, ±0.50. Furthermore, provisioning services were perceived to be of moderately high level (3.49, ±1.12), and visitor perceptions of urban forest amenities were positive, with high-level scores (4.39, ±0.53). Overall, this indicates that visitors had a very good perception of Taman Tugu Urban Forest ecosystem services. However, when we looked at the factors that contributed to the willingness to pay for the conservation of urban forests and entry, only the perception of the amenities provided at Taman Tugu had a significant relationship with the willingness to pay. A total of 79.1% of visitors expressed their willingness to pay, for forest conservation, an average payment value of MYR 51.32 per year, while 65% of visitors were willing to pay, as entry fees at urban forests, an average payment value of MYR 3.07 per person. It can be concluded that visitors had a positive perception of urban forests in Kuala Lumpur and were willing to contribute for conservation and entry fee purposes. We hope that the findings of this research contribute to a better understanding of urban forest ecosystem services in Kuala Lumpur and visitor perception. In addition, this study could also be useful to policy makers to formulate a specific policy focus on urban forests by comprehensively and holistically including the monetary value of the ecosystem services provided, considering public opinion and needs, and performing financial allocation for conserving and managing urban forests. This is to ensure that the urban sustainable development goals and smart city aims can be achieved. Full article

Considering in situ carbon storage in forest management has gained momentum under increasing pressure to decarbonize our economies. Here, we present results from case studies in Portugal and Germany showing the opportunity costs of in situ carbon storage derived by multiple-objective optimization. We used a stand-level model to optimize land expectation value under uncertainty as a reference, then derived opportunity costs by including the enhancement of the average carbon storage in aboveground biomass as a second objective. Using the optimal (compromise) solution when considering both objectives simultaneously, we show opportunity costs of EUR 119 (Portugal) and EUR 68 (Germany) per Mg CO_2eq. These opportunity costs are higher than conservative, but lower than alternative cost estimates for future damages caused by current CO₂ emissions. An important result was that suggested reference solutions in both countries (though only for low discount rates in Portugal) were mixed forests without clearfelling. In Germany, this implicitly elevated carbon storage. Such “closer-to-nature-forest-management” systems were also mostly suggested by the optimization tool when carbon storage was an objective. Full article

This paper proposes a decision-making framework that integrates Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), Best-Worst (BW), and Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) methods in a forestry management problem. Namely, the application of the proposed framework has been shown in the case study area of the National Park “Fruska Gora” in Serbia. The decision-making problem included five criteria (biodiversity protection, wilderness protection, promotion of tourism, promotion of education function, and sustainable use of natural resources) and four alternatives—management plans (“business as usual”, “eco-tourism”, “protection of natural ecosystems” and “use of natural resources”). The results were focused on proclaiming a winning alternative in a multi-criteria context and have been tested for the different risk attitudes: risk-prone, risk-neutral, and risk-averse. For the risk-prone scenario, the winning alternative was “protection of natural ecosystems”, while the risk-neutral and risk-averse scenarios recognized “eco-tourism” as the winning alternative. The same procedure can be repeated for many other forest management tasks that require multiple criteria setting and risk attitude analysis. Full article

Ecological restoration is considered a nature-based solution to reduce ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, and combat climate change. In this sense, the objective of this study was to identify the knowledge management practices that are present in an ecological restoration process in the tropical dry forest. The empirical study was developed using a mixed approach over an area of 11,079 ha in Huila, Colombia. At first, the qualitative study was supported by a documentary review and participant observation between 2018 and 2020. On the other hand, the quantitative study was carried out through the application of the Delphi method with the participation of 64 experts. Twenty-two knowledge management practices were identified with orientation towards human factors, organization, information technologies, strategy, and intellectual protection. These findings show that all the knowledge management practices identified have an impact on the six components of the ecological restoration process (planning, diagnosis, implementation, monitoring, participation, and consolidation). Likewise, these practices contribute to the generation, transformation, and mobilization of local and scientific knowledge in the components of the ecological restoration process of the tropical dry forest. Full article