Shuffling the deck: A gamified multicriteria approach to prioritize agroecological restoration areas in Northeastern Pará, Brazilian Amazon

Decision support tools such as Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) can be employed in the context of the Theory of Change (ToC) to support stakeholders' concerns and guide agroecological transitions in the tropics. Given the so often limitation of financial resources, identifying priority areas for large-scale, cost-effective agroecological investments is critical. This study introduces a simplified card-ranking MCDA approach to integrate spatialised socioecological factors and stakeholder preferences for identifying priority restoration areas in Northeastern Pará, Brazil. The stakeholders interviewed comprised 20 farmers and 23 specialists. They were tasked in ranking 21 factors with potential to influence secondary vegetation dynamics (according to a regression modelling study), grouped into two clusters: "economic/infrastructure" and "biophysical/land use restrictions". Both groups prioritised key infrastructure factors, like distance to 'roads', 'markets', and 'urban centres'. Discrepancies arose in biophysical/land use factors, with farmers prioritising, for example, 'conservation units of sustainable use', a factor disregarded by specialists. The data was processed through a prioritization model applied to 10 × 10 km grids to produce maps. Specialists identified 5 % of the NE Pará mesoregion as high priority, while farmers indicated 9 %, with convergence revealing Bragantina as the key microregion to promote agroecology (33 % high-priority area). Our results offer insights into Structured Decision Making (SDM) methods and inform regional policies, highlighting western Bragantina and southwestern Salgado as prime areas for cost-effective agroecological restoration interventions.