Ecosystem services are essential to the well-being of people and places and thus their continued flow to human societies is a critical issue for ecosystem management. The status and vulnerability of ecosystem services (ES) to development projects is pivotal for identifying management needs of multifunctional ecosystems. While threats to ES from particular development projects have been quantified, the social perceptions of these by broader stakeholders have been rarely studied. Moreover, social assessments have been mainly focused on cultural ES, while eliciting perceptions of a broader range of ES containing regulating, provisioning and supporting ES are limited. We address these gaps here by eliciting stakeholder perceptions of ES provided by mountainous regions and how they might change due to infrastructure developments in our case study region, Mashhad metropolitan in Iran, by conducting a social survey to recruit people residing in the vicinity of the proposed development (n = 385) and experts (n = 17) based on a face-to-face questionnaire. Results indicate that the importance attributed to ES and their perceptions of service vulnerability were similar across inhabitants and experts. However, per- ceptions of ES vulnerability to highway construction varied significantly between the groups. Inhabitants valued water supply the most (61.1 %), while providing habitat for native species was the most valued service by ex- perts. Our findings highlight the important role of mountainous ecosystems in peri-urban areas as quantified by our surveys. The differences in perceptions across the two groups highlight the need for a participatory approach to urban planning and adaptive management of ESs to engage different interests and concerns of different stakeholders.

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