Using stakeholder-based fuzzy cognitive mapping to assess benefits of restoration in wildfire-vulnerable forests

Understanding the benefits provided by restoring overstocked forests is crucial to guiding the choice of management actions, policy initiatives, and investments by beneficiaries, that is, monetizing ecosystem services. Using stakeholder-based fuzzy cognitive mapping, collected through workshops with natural-resource professionals, we mapped the interactions of ecosystem services and the perceived effects of management actions on them. In line with current concerns in the California study area, we found that fire protection was perceived as central (i.e., having a high degree of congruence with other ecosystem services) with improved fire protection providing important secondary effects on other ecosystem services, notably air-quality protection, provision of habitat, and carbon storage. Forest restoration involves multiple fuels-reduction actions, which were perceived as benefiting fire protection, with subsets also offering strong benefits to other ecosystem services. Prescribed burning, defensible-space creation, understory thinning, and replanting showed particularly large differences in effects when accounting for interactions of ecosystem services. Resource managers and other nonmanager professionals prioritized similar ecosystem services, with the second group placing more importance on interactions between different ecosystem services. Ecosystem-service valuation that includes interactions offers a salient, credible, and legitimate approach to inform multi-benefit forest management, particularly where partnerships must monetize some of those benefits to finance critical landscape restoration.