Community preferences for preservation of Canary Palm from Red Palm Weevil infestation in the city of Bari

Over the past few years, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier, 1790), namely the Red Palm Weevil (RPW), in the City of Bari, caused the death of 164 (20% of the species) Phoenix canariensis Chabaud, namely the Canary Palm, up to 2013. The ornamental value that the City of Bari lost was between two and two and a half million euros. A discrete choice experiment assessed the willingness to pay (WTP) for several characteristics of a possible preservation plan for Canary Palm in the City of Bari. The survey was carried out through face-to-face interviews with 626 respondents during the period October 2017-May 2018. The results highlighted a positive WTP for: increasing the number of Canary Palms in squares, parks, public villas and near monuments and historic buildings of the San Nicola - Murat district; increasing the number of Canary Palms in areas characterized by high social and cultural value (institutional buildings) in the suburban districts (San Paolo – Stanic; Japigia - Torre a Mare; Libertà - Marconi - San Girolamo); planting Canary Palms in groups; extending the pest control plan in the aforesaid points and areas, but mainly for group and road palms. A negative WTP, instead, resulted for reducing or even substituting Canary Palms with other tree species, for the use of these trees along roads in the central district, for their use in the residential areas, and for the planting of single trees. Mean WTP was € 6.22/family/year, per 10 years. Considering a total annual maintenance cost (pruning and pest control) of about 150,000 €, and a number of households equal to 137,000 in the city, a proper preservation strategy is widely justified and desirable. The study allows minimising the net present value of damages by RPW, and optimising the management costs over time. A tool for the improvement of this research can be a structured database to manage available information about RPW from the high number of published investigations in diverse either conventional or IT format. Currently, the database contains 2,125 bibliographic entries, mainly obtained scrutinising reliable bibliographic repositories as CAB Abstract Archives & CAB abstract direct, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. Each bibliographic reference constitutes a record within the database structured in various fields. We invented the opportunity to select and drag words in an abstract to a "topic descriptive field". This functionality is possible thanks to the presence of eight "descriptor content" fields that can be searched and sorted to retrieve requested references, basing on the number of words for that topic. By dragging one or more parts of the abstract into the side list of content descriptors, you can assign them an appropriate descriptor, choosing from a list of 19 descriptors (Biogeography, Bionomics, Cocos nucifera, Control, Damages, DNA/RNA, Elaeis guineensis, Food, Host plant, Morphology/Anatomy, Natural enemies, Paper structure, Phoenix canariensis, Phoenix dactylifera, Physiology, Quality of compilation, Review, Rules, Symbiont). Of course, new descriptors can be added. The database is now accessible online at http://193.204.185.110:8181/fmi/iwp/res/iwp_auth.html;jsessionid=05C4EF28640C452C15E7B3AC.wpc1, as Guest (consultation) or User (participative intent).