The rural landscape management

The landscape has a dynamic character and its continuous transformation cannot be stopped, neither ignored; however, it is a civic duty to manage the landscape to avoid that the natural and semi-natural ecosystems do not work in balance. With this awareness for an issue always more current, the present work explores the link between the community engagement and the ecosystem services assessment as a potential tool for improving the decision-making processes aimed at the landscape management, especially for the rural one. Actually, from one hand it emerges how involving stakeholders in the landscape management is important to share common visions and plan effective actions for the conservation/transformation of landscape, starting by people’s perceptions. From the other hand, the work highlights how the assessment of ecosystem services constitutes a helpful and comprehensive data set for implementing the landscape management. By these considerations, a “twofold approach” that includes subjective and objective data aimed at an integrated and multidisciplinary landscape management is presented and applied in the Collemeluccio-Montedimezzo Alto Molise Biosphere Reserve, Central Italy.