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Recent literature highlights the crucial role of deadwood in forests, emphasizing its contribution to biodiversity conservation, soil fertility, climate change mitigation, and bioenergy production. However, managing deadwood presents challenges as decision-makers must balance trade-offs and synergies between these ecological benefits. A participatory approach, incorporating user opinions, can support effective decision-making. This study surveyed 1207 university students from Iran, Italy, and Türkiye to explore their perceptions of deadwood’s role and the potential trade-offs among climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and bioenergy production. Results indicate a high level of awareness among students regarding deadwood’s ecological functions, but preferences vary significantly across cultural and regional contexts. Results show that for students of all three countries, the most important function related to the deadwood in forests is the provision of microhabitats for wildlife, while in second place for Iranian students, there is bioenergy production, and for Turkish and Italian students, soil fertilization. In addition, results highlight that students prefer the management strategies based on leaving both standing dead trees and lying deadwood in the forest. This study reinforces existing literature on deadwood’s importance for biodiversity and underscores the need for informed policies that balance ecological values with practical management considerations.

This study aims to develop an online survey on the tourist perception of the visitor management system of the Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia. As tourists are particularly sensitive to organisational issues related to the Park management, a bottom-up approach based on visitors’ opinions has been applied. First of all, a brief chronology has been reconstructed that retraces the most significant stages of the Park. Subsequently, an online questionnaire was structured on the basis of the current Park Management Plan with a focus on the macro-topics concerning the visitor management system. The survey was distributed using the Google Form application. A total of 214 questionnaires were collected in the period between May and July 2022. The sample was statistically analysed to detect the main habits of the Park users. The Mann-Whitney-Wilcox U test and the Kruskal-Wallis test were applied to identify the differences in the priorities attributed by visitors to the various management actions. Among the main findings of the research, the authors identified that national visitors (i.e. Croatian) place a higher priority on the implementation of services and infrastructure than tourists from other countries. In addition, those who have visited the Park on multiple occasions have higher safety expectations than those who have only visited the Park once. This category of visitors also considers it more important to take into account the opinions of visitors. Furthermore, with regard to retail and souvenir shops, tourists are generally inclined to set a lower priority for intervention than that attributed to other management aspects. The results of this study can be of great value to Park managers, who should consider visitors as key stakeholders in the decision-making process that is the foundation for managing this important natural resource.

Italy is one of the countries with the greatest historic heritage in the world, but also one of the most seismic. In this context an earthquake can cause significant damage. Usually, the vulnerability of a building is verified with in-depth and expensive structural assessment, without considering spatial relations and local context. In this study a method is proposed for the assessment of Territorial Seismic Vulnerability, based on both building characteristics and morphological and spatial parameters. It is an urban-scale approach that allows an objective classification of buildings using an economical procedure. The method, based on the development of a geographical Multiple Criteria Decision Making model and on the participatory approach of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, has been tested in the study area of Garfagnana (Tuscany). The model can be a useful support tool for urban planning, allowing the optimization of public resources in the most vulnerable areas.