• Farmers prioritized forest products and income from agroforestry-based community forests (ACFs) over other ecosystem services. • Education level influenced the perceived importance of specific ecosystem services. • Current contributions of ACFs to provisioning services remain low. • Promoting short-term income-generating and fast-growing native tree species could enhance benefits. Agroforestry is a popular reforestation approach in agriculture-forest landscapes due to its focus on diverse ecosystem services. In Myanmar, agroforestry-based community forests (ACFs) have been implemented since 2013 to reforest areas encroached upon by agriculture in state forests. This study aimed to improve ACF implementation by analyzing farmers’ perceptions of the contributions of ecosystem services, including provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services, to their livelihoods. We surveyed 291 households by using a questionnaire including closed and open-ended questions, and conducted forest inventories across 42 sample plots. The methods for analyzing social data included descriptive statistics, partial proportional odds model, and qualitative co-occurrence analysis. With regard to forest data, we analyzed species composition, above-ground biomass, and canopy cover. Farmers perceived provisioning ecosystem services as the most important, followed by regulating services. Socioeconomic factors significantly shaped these perceptions: education, particularly at secondary and higher levels, positively influenced the perceived importance of regulating services, whereas household income negatively influenced the perceived importance of cultural services. In contrast, larger landholdings were linked to greater perceived importance of cultural services. Despite the high perceived importance of provisioning services, the actual contribution of ACFs to provisioning services and their economic potential remained low, highlighting the need to enhance these ecosystem functions. We discuss options for improving provisioning services as well as other ecosystem services based on farmers’ needs and values. Among these options is the incorporation of fast-growing native tree species that can generate both short- and long-term income through timber and non-timber forest products. Overall, this study demonstrates that applying the ecosystem services framework to assess farmers’ perceptions and the current contributions of ACFs provides valuable insights into their limited socio-economic benefits and their ecological role in supporting environmental stability.
San et al. (Wed,) studied this question.