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Since ancient times, Mediterranean pine forests have been habitat for human activity, providing a wide range of goods such as timber, seeds, resin and derived products. Among them, tar and resin have played an historical role on the interaction between human activity and forests. In Spain, the resin played an important role in the economic and social development in rural areas during 20th century. But after 1980, resin production plummeted and the virtual disappearance of resin tapping caused the abandonment of traditional forest activities and the subsequently losses of ecosystem forest services (provision, regulation and cultural). This paper deals with some of the ecosystem services provided by resin tapped pine forests and shows how the abandonment of this traditional forestry activity would lead to a loss of social welfare beyond the economic activity. Among these ecosystem services, special attention is paid to the biodiversity of the pine forests. For that purpose, a stratified vegetation sampling was conducted in the leading resin-tapping Spanish region. Ecological analysis was therefore compared with the social preferences for several attributes associated to resin-tapped pine forests in Spain, including the biodiversity of flora., Financial support from the SUDOE Interreg IV B – UE/EU FEDER/ERDF program (project SUST-FOREST, ref. SOE2/P2/E261) is acknowledged. This paper is also an accidental contribution of M.S. and S.M. to the project StarTree (funded by the European Union through the European Commission's FP7 Cooperation Work Programme).

13 Pág. Instituto de Ciencias Forestales (ICIFOR), The forest floor C stock needs to be accurately estimated in order to quantify its contribution to nutrient cycling and other ecological processes as well as for reporting purposes under international agreements. Hence, a modelling approach was used which involved testing three different types of models (GLM, GAM and random forest) to determine which one provided the best estimates of forest floor C stocks. The dataset employed contained over 1650 observations from different available sources embracing different climatic, topographic and biotic variables to be tested in the model. The approach that provided the best estimation of forest floor C stock was the random forest method, with forest type, latitude, altitude, canopy cover, mean summer temperature, annual accumulated temperature, summer precipitation, water deficit and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as covariates. To obtain a robust forecast, several iterations of the model were performed to estimate forest floor C stocks from the mean of the predictions. The model estimated a forest floor C stock of 0.148 ± 0.081 Pg, equivalent to a biomass of 0.381 ± 0.214 Pg, for a wooded area of almost 184,000 km2 in peninsular Spain and the Balearic Islands. The predictions were also presented in the form of a map showing the spatial distribution of the forest floor C stock. The results revealed a mean forest floor C stock of 8 Mg C ha-1 for Spanish forests and identified differences between coniferous (10.1 Mg C ha-1) and hardwood forests (6.3 Mg C ha-1)., This study was conducted under the ‘Encomienda MAPAMA-INIA: Scientific support for the generation of forest information’ (EG17-042-C02-02 project) and the INIA project ‘Sistemas forestales ante el cambio global’ (IMP2018-004-C02-02). We would like to thank Dr. Gregorio Montero for the concept and development of the idea for this study, Dra. Miren del Río for her helpful comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript and Adam Collins for the language revision of the manuscript.