Mapping Wood Mobilization Suitability in Greece: A Spatial Multi-Criteria Assessment from Forest Potential to Eligible Area

Forests across the European Union represent a renewable resource, yet felling volumes consistently fall short of the net annual increment, producing persistent “wood mobilization gaps.” Greece exemplifies this imbalance, remaining a net importer of wood despite its large forest resources. This study develops a GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation framework to quantify Greece’s wood mobilization suitability at the NUTS-3 scale—a measure of relative eligibility rather than harvestable timber volume or economic supply—integrating eight biophysical, infrastructural, and socioeconomic criteria while accounting for protected area, terrain, and post-fire exclusion constraints. Applying these exclusions reduces Greece’s 3.4 million ha to approximately 2.43 million ha of forest estate eligible for mobilization, with legal protection—rather than terrain or fire—the dominant constraint. Regions with larger eligible areas are distinguished primarily by socioeconomic rather than biophysical criteria, and regional rankings remain broadly robust across alternative policy-weighting schemes, though agreement narrows among top-priority regions under conservation-oriented weighting. The post-fire exclusion window shows a fire-history-specific, nonlinear increase near four years rather than a confirmed ecological threshold, while mobilization potential is spatially diffuse rather than concentrated, indicating that no compact high-value core exists for targeted intervention. These findings suggest that expanding Greece’s domestic wood mobilization suitability requires geographically distributed, regionally coordinated policy, not a few flagship investments.