Multipurpose trees and non-wood forest products a challenge and opportunity: Decision support for forest management of NWFPs and ecosystem services

The ultimate goal of the STAR TREE project is to provide better understanding, knowledge, guidance and tools to support relevant stakeholders (e.g., forest owners, resource managers, enterprises, decision makers, other public and private entities) in optimising the management of multi-purpose trees and developing innovative approaches for increasing the marketability and profitability of non wood forest products (NWFP) for a more competitive rural economy. STAR TREE will generate new knowledge and tools that will support the conservation and sustainability of forest resources, and a sustainable rural development, through a stronger utilisation of business opportunities based on multi-purpose trees (MPT) and NWFP. Through this STAR TREE mainly aims at showing how NWFP and MPT can contribute to improving quality of life in rural areas, without jeopardising the sustainability and conservation of natural resources (including forests). This requires that STAR TREE draws on a balanced methodological approach that will simultaneously consider social needs and ecological potentials. The Institute of Silviculture will use the information identified and generated in the regional case studies for developing a framework for assessing different combinations of NWFP and forest ecosystem services. The aim is to analyse the trade-offs for the forest owner in providing ecosystem services and NWFP considering the particular socio-economic situation at the FMU level in different regional contexts. Based on the findings of the regional case studies the strengths and weaknesses as well as threats and opportunities related to each ecosystem service will be assessed. Bayesian Believe Networks (BBN) will be constructed to combine and synthesize expert knowledge and quantitative data on the interaction of species composition, management regime and provision of ecosystem services. Multi-criteria analysis techniques will be used to allow expressing preferences (e.g. weighting of indicators) and support forest owners to choose between several options that are candidates for development, by comparing their relative success in different socio-economic situations. Based on the results multiple use forest management plans (for the FMU level) can be developed by stakeholders based on the expert knowledge provided taking into account the forest management objectives and conservation targets set.