In recent years, social acceptance of biodiversity conservation in forests has become increasingly important at the international level, both within the scientific community and among policy makers. In the literature, some studies have investigated citizens' preferences towards biodiversity conservation in protected areas, while there is a knowledge gap regarding the social acceptance of biodiversity conservation measures in productive forests (for timber and/or bioenergy production). The creation of a network of senescence islands or deadwood islands – areas of 2-3 ha aimed at promoting the formation of deadwood and microhabitat trees – within productive forests represents an efficient measure for the conservation of saproxylic biodiversity. The present study investigated– through the administration of a semi-structured questionnaire to a sample of citizens–the social preferences and perceptions towards the biodiversity conservation through the creation of a network of senescence islands in two case studies: Cansiglio Orientale forest in Italy and Sailershausen university forest in Germany. The questionnaire–divided into three thematic sections–has investigated the first thematic section the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents, in the second section the opinions on the importance of the main ecosystem services provided by the forests, and in the third section the aesthetic-visual preferences towards different forest management scenarios representing through images (from the production forests without deadwood to the deadwood islands characterized by an high amount of deadwood volume). The results showed that German respondents assign a higher visual-aesthetic value to images of the Sailershausen university forest characterized by a high presence of deadwood (typical of senescence islands), while Italian respondents assign a clear preference to images of productive forests without lying deadwood and standing dead trees. This result is confirmed by the importance assigned by German respondents to the conservation of fauna and flora as the main ecosystem service provided by forests compared to Italian respondents who were more oriented towards regulating services such as climate change mitigation and natural hazards protection.