The first Portuguese stakeholder workshop took place on November 22-23, 2017, at the Portuguese Catholic University in Porto, about 50 km from the case study area (CSA).

One of the main goals of the event was to engage the stakeholders in the analysis of both current and alternative stand-level forest management models.

To support this goal, the research team (RT) took advantage of former interviews targeting the characterization of the main actors in the CSA and compiled the most relevant information tailored to the stakeholders´ needs.   At the workshop, the RT presented first the preliminary results regarding the provision of ecosystem services by both current and alternative forest management models. Afterwards,  the RT applied participatory approach to elicit stakeholders’ preferences and to define criteria for assessing forest management models. A cognitive map was built to illustrate the results.

Moreover, the RT presented a web-based decision support system - SADfLOR to illustrate the generation of the CSA decision spaces and the development of the decision-making process. Participants gained  hands-on experience of the system and provided the RT with feedback about its features and future developments. Furthermore, they tested a Pareto frontier decision support module to get a better grasp of the CSA ecosystem services’ provision capability as well as of the trade-offs between ecosystem services (e.g., wood harvested and carbon stored). 

Altogether, the participants were very interested in the workshop contents.  They were looking forward to attending the next stakeholder workshop in October 2018.