Rural communities’ perception of forest ecosystem services, threats and options to sustain services across West Africa

Identifying how local people perceive forest ecosystem services (FES) and their importance can inform sustainable forest use and management, especially when differences in sociodemographic variables are considered. However, evidence on how local communities perceive the ecosystem services provided by forest patches in West Africa is limited. To address this gap, this study investigates rural communities’ perceptions of FES and the perceived threats to them. We conducted 2,621 household surveys, complemented by 49 focus group discussions across nine forest patches in four countries: Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Descriptive analysis showed that provisioning services are the most widely perceived benefit from forests (83.5%), followed by regulating services (12%) and cultural services (1.6%). Logging, bushfires, and drought were identified as the major threats to FES provision. Through a logistic regression model and the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric H test, our findings reveal that education and main occupation mainly frequently predict and significantly influence FES perceptions. Furthermore, implementing restoration strategies is seen as the key option proposed by the communities to sustain FES provision from forests in agricultural landscapes. As forests continue to face pressures, the value rural communities attach to FES is determinant in informing forest management strategies in West Africa