An expert model approach to assess the potential of non-wood forest products for forest owners

Mestrado em Engenharia Florestal e dos Recursos Naturais - Instituto Superior de Agronomia - UL

The interest in sustainable development and environmental management from non-wood forest products (NWFPs) has been growing during the past decade. These products are important in the bio-economy especially in regions where wood is not the most profitable product. As NWFPs cover a wide range of species they provide an array of alternatives to use more green products and are a relevant component of sustainable forest management. We present an approach to characterize the potential of most promising NWFPs in the Alentejo region. We used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), one of many multi-criteria decision making methods, and a Delphi approach to support judgments collected from stakeholders and domain experts. In order to facilitate and manage the pairwise comparisons in the application of the AHP we selected seven regional NWFPs: boletus (Boletus edulis), cork (Quercus suber), pine nuts (Pinus pinea), pine resin (Pinus spp), yellow lavender (Lavandula viridis), honey from bees (Apis mellifera), and rabbit as game meat (Oryctolagus cuniculus). AHP incorporated the judgments (weights) from experts along a hierarchical decomposition of the problem into a set of criteria and sub-criteria, and generated a regionally explicit ranking of alternatives (NWFPs) by deriving priorities. The three NWFPs with the highest potential were cork, pine nuts and yellow lavender. In a second level of importance were boletus, pine resin, honey and rabbit. These results further reinforce that cork is the product with the greatest potential in Alentejo region. However, yellow lavender has a significant potential and could be an interesting opportunity for forest owners that aim diversifying the basket of products supplied. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the model is robust because the ranking of NWFPs did not change much with the weights of criteria. This model also provides forest owners with information to develop management strategies or to engage in related NWFPs businesses