Abstract Soil biodiversity is crucial for maintaining forest health and safeguarding forest ecosystem services delivery, but it is under increasing human pressure. Forest management puts pressure on soil biodiversity, but has also the potential to support soil biodiversity recovery, depending on which decisions forest managers make. These decisions are highly influenced by managers' perception and understanding. Nevertheless, insights into forest managers' understanding of soils and their biodiversity are largely lacking. This paper addresses this gap by studying private and public forest managers' understanding of soil biodiversity and comparing their level of knowledge with scientists' knowledge. In addition, this paper assesses the effects of context on understanding by comparing between two regions (NW of Flanders, Belgium, and NE of Romania). Specifically, knowledge was elicited using semi-structured interviews based on an integrated framework. The interviews were coded and analyzed using a Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach. In total, 24 interviews were conducted after selecting respondents using a purposive sampling design. Our results indicate that forest managers are aware of the crucial role of soil biodiversity and possess practical and context-specific understanding, but lack in-depth knowledge related to ecosystem processes and functions and soil state variables, compared to scientists. In addition, managers did not seem to explicitly consider soil biodiversity in their management decisions, but instead seemed to treat soil more as a black box. While scientists had a more detailed understanding, their understanding also depended on their background as researchers and mostly overlooked practical, site-specific implications. Moreover, we found that local context influenced respondents' understanding, especially related to drivers and pressures that affect soil biodiversity. Hence, communication strategies oriented towards forest managers seem suitable to maximize adoption of adaptive management practices that support soil biodiversity. These strategies should go beyond awareness raising and specifically explain ecosystem processes and functions linked to forest soil biodiversity to improve managers' in-depth understanding, while taking their socio-economic and forestry context into account. Further, policy design should enhance conditions for knowledge exchange and discussion about soil biodiversity. The methodology presented in this study might help such knowledge integration of scientists and forest managers in order to combine in-depth understanding of soil biodiversity and applicability of management practices in specific forest contexts.

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科学家和管理者对土壤生物多样性了解多少？可持续森林管理的比较知识图谱

摘要 土壤生物多样性对于维持森林健康和保障森林生态系统服务的提供至关重要，但它正面临着越来越大的人类压力。森林管理对土壤生物多样性施加压力，但也有可能支持土壤生物多样性恢复，这取决于森林管理者做出的决定。这些决策很大程度上受到管理者的认知和理解的影响。然而，在很大程度上缺乏对森林管理者对土壤及其生物多样性的理解的见解。本文通过研究私人和公共森林管理者对土壤生物多样性的理解并将他们的知识水平与科学家的知识进行比较来弥补这一差距。此外，本文通过比较两个地区（佛兰德斯西北、比利时、和罗马尼亚东北部）。具体来说，知识是使用基于集成框架的半结构化访谈来获取的。使用模糊认知映射方法对访谈进行编码和分析。在使用有目的的抽样设计选择受访者后，总共进行了 24 次访谈。我们的研究结果表明，与科学家相比，森林管理者意识到土壤生物多样性的关键作用，并具有实际和特定背景的理解，但缺乏与生态系统过程和功能以及土壤状态变量相关的深入知识。此外，管理者在他们的管理决策中似乎没有明确考虑土壤生物多样性，而是更多地将土壤视为黑匣子。虽然科学家们有了更详细的了解，他们的理解还取决于他们作为研究人员的背景，并且大多忽略了实际的、特定于地点的影响。此外，我们发现当地环境影响了受访者的理解，尤其是与影响土壤生物多样性的驱动因素和压力有关。因此，面向森林管理者的交流策略似乎适合最大限度地采用支持土壤生物多样性的适应性管理实践。这些战略应超越提高认识，具体解释与森林土壤生物多样性相关的生态系统过程和功能，以提高管理人员的深入了解，同时考虑到他们的社会经济和林业背景。此外，政策设计应为有关土壤生物多样性的知识交流和讨论创造条件。