Mapping Ecosystem Conservation Priority Based on Social Assessment, a Tool to Assist Land Use Planning

Abstract

The lack of planning regarding the spatial location and extent of different anthropogenic activities (such as agricultural produc-tion, biodiversity conservation, tourism, and urbanization) results in unsustainable land use and occupancy. Unplanned land usechange threatens the supply of ecosystem services (ES) and thus, human well-­being. Reversing this requires participatory landuse planning that includes the stakeholders who inhabit the territory. Here, we analyze the social assessment of ES and its spatialrepresentation on a map of Ecosystem Conservation Priority (ECP). In participatory workshops, we used the Analytic HierarchyProcess to characterize the assessment of stakeholders about the ES provided by forest landscapes. Among the ES analyzed, allstakeholders prioritized ES associated with hydrological regulation (Watershed Conservation Potential). Most stakeholders as-signed a lower value to provisioning ES than to supporting and regulating ES, except for Agribusiness and Farmers. In addittion,we integrated social assessments with spatially explicit information through Multicriteria Modeling which allowed us to mapECP. Finally, we generated a map of consensus and dissent regarding ECP which can be used as input for land use planning. Thehighest consensus levels (86.45%) were mainly located in the upper watershed. In contrast, lower consensus levels (7.88%) werelocated mainly in plain areas of degraded and fragmented native forests. These results suggest that the ongoing transformationof forest ecosystems is linked to tensions that prioritize urbanization and agricultural activities as opposed to agroforestry landuses. Efforts to prevent the degradation of natural ecosystems require planning that addresses the complexity of social-­ecologicalsystems.