Collaborative Management of Ecosystem Services in Natural Parks Based on AHP and PROMETHEE

Management of protected areas has been focusing on conservation and recreation. Nevertheless, current governance trends include other ecosystem services from social and economic perspectives by involving stakeholders. The objectives of this chapter are to select and prioritize projects, as well as to develop new indicators based on the main functions of ecosystems to classify the territory inside protected areas. Both purposes take into account the provided ecosystem services and the stakeholders’ preferences in order to implement a collaborative decision making tool in a forest Natural Park. When applying AHP in order to elicit people’s preferences, it is important to have a graphic tool, which allows answering pair comparisons easily, obtaining the inconsistency index online and facilitating the revision of their answers. This case study provides a friendly implementation with macros in Excel, which enables the users to elicit and then revise their judgments if their inconsistency index is not acceptable, increasing by a lot the percentage of consistent surveys. The Excel application aggregates judgments from a group of people by the geometric mean in order to derive priorities for collaborative management. Although PROMETHEE is applied by using D-Sight software, we provide its implementation in Excel for illustrative purposes. This outranking approach enables us to select and prioritize projects and generates indicators to classify areas of the territory according to their main ecosystem services. These indicators are shown in graphs, which are simple to understand, providing relevant information for collaborative management of Natural Parks.