The researchers searched Web of Science and Scopus on 18 December 2022 without restricting the publication period. They formulated their questions using the population-exposure-outcome framework and followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol. The searches returned 307 records. After removal of 101 duplicates, two articles published in languages other than English and seven ineligible document types, title-and-abstract screening excluded 140 of the remaining 197 records. Full-text assessment excluded another 15, leaving 42 publications for in-depth analysis.

Eligible publications were original works focused on the ecosystem services associated with edible plants or fungi. General ecosystem services assessments that merely listed wild food alongside wild animals were excluded, as were studies addressing species that were not edible. The review covered multiple continents, spatial scales and foraging habitats. Europe contributed the most publications, followed by Asia, with smaller numbers in North America, Africa, Latin America and Australia. European studies were primarily regional or local, but the review did not establish that this scale pattern applied worldwide.

Almost all included studies, 93%, mentioned at least one foraging habitat. Forests appeared in 52%, agroecosystems in 29% and urban habitats in 19%. Wild edible plants were the principal subject in 86% of the articles, compared with 29% for wild mushrooms, while 14% examined both groups. The earliest selected publications appeared in 2014, followed by two or three papers annually in the early years and an increase to nine or ten per year after 2020. The review documented this pattern but did not establish its cause.

A keyword analysis identified two central clusters. One included “ecosystem services,” “non-timber forest products,” “wild edible plants” and “wild food,” while the other included “provisioning ES,” “urban foraging” and “biocultural diversity.” Studies applied the ecosystem services framework inconsistently: 31% mentioned provisioning services, 7% focused on cultural services and 29% addressed both, while 33% acknowledged wild foods as ecosystem services without identifying a section. Only 7% explicitly mentioned an ecosystem services classification system.

Methodological approaches also varied. Approximately 36% of the studies combined biophysical and sociocultural methods, 36% relied only on sociocultural methods and 26% used only biophysical methods. Fourteen percent mapped wild edible resources or harvesting sites. Using version 5.1 of the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services, the reviewers assigned 16 service classes to the literature: five provisioning and 11 cultural. Every included study described wild plants or mushrooms as food. Other provisioning uses included plant or fungal materials, cultivation, energy sources and genetic material.

The cultural classes included traditional ecological knowledge, culture and heritage, recreation, education, scientific investigation, spiritual or symbolic meaning, entertainment, existence value and future-use value. Traditional ecological knowledge appeared in 55% of papers, culture and heritage in 52% and recreational activities in 43%. The reviewers noted that medicinal uses did not fit neatly into the classification and placed them under the class for fibres and other materials for direct use or processing. In 76% of publications, the researchers could identify the motivations for foraging. Personal consumption was prominent in Asia and Latin America, while leisure was especially important in Europe. Income through local or informal markets appeared across Europe, Asia and Latin America, and tradition was especially common in Latin American studies.

Potential harms were reported in about 29% of the articles. The most frequently mentioned concern was overexploitation, followed by faulty harvesting methods, harvesting endangered species and, in one Romanian study, illegal harvesting. Sustainable practices were mentioned in 52% of studies, including planting or seeding species, forest management, harvesting only common species and using sustainable harvesting methods. Twelve percent of studies reported benefits for particular species, including increased productivity in the reviewed examples of wild bamboo and wild asparagus. Separately, 14% reported other advantages such as environmental awareness and contributions to urban resilience and sustainability; these percentages describe the reviewed literature and do not establish a general effect across foraging systems.

The review has bounded coverage because it relied on two citation databases, which may have omitted books, book chapters, regional studies and conference papers, and because its search terms did not include the Nature Contribution to People framework. Many included studies also had small samples or restricted geographic scopes, limiting generalizability. The authors concluded that wild edible plants and mushrooms remain under-researched within ecosystem services research. They recommended more consistent classification, spatial mapping and monitoring, combined ecological and sociocultural methods, and collaboration among researchers, foragers, managers and policymakers to support sustainable management and land-use decisions.

Subject of Research: Systematic review of the provisioning and cultural ecosystem services associated with wild edible plants and mushrooms

Article Title: How wild edible plants and mushrooms have been approached within the ecosystem services framework: a systematic review

Article References: Paula, A., Pulido, F., Figueiredo, A., & Castro, P. (2025). How wild edible plants and mushrooms have been approached within the ecosystem services framework: a systematic review. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e145448. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e145448

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e145448

Keywords: systematic review, wild edible plants, wild mushrooms, ecosystem services, provisioning services, cultural services, foraging, sustainable harvesting, CICES, ethnobiology, wild, edible

Dung beetles, the coprophagous members of the subfamilies Scarabaeinae, Geotrupinae, and Aphodiinae, are among the most ecologically significant yet underappreciated insects in terrestrial ecosystems. Through the burial of dung, they recycle nutrients, improve soil structure, disperse seeds, and suppress parasite populations that would otherwise build up around vertebrate droppings. They are also exceptionally sensitive to environmental change, which makes them reliable bioindicators for monitoring habitat disturbance and climate impacts. Despite these services, conservation attention for dung beetles and many other insect groups remains strikingly low compared with charismatic vertebrates. The Oaxaca project set out to address this gap at multiple levels: describing new species, mapping ecological niches, modeling how distributions might shift under climate change, and building the complementary community data needed to understand these insects across a complex mountainous landscape.

Oaxaca presents a distinctive institutional challenge for field biologists. Most of the land is communally owned by Indigenous communities, which means that access cannot be obtained through the standardized permit applications, institutional affiliations, and predefined research guidelines that govern work in federally administered Natural Protected Areas. Instead, researchers must present their proposals formally to local authorities, engage in dialogue, and secure permission through trust and respect. The team describes how this process, while less predictable than bureaucratic permitting, creates something the regulatory route rarely does: a personal, long-term relationship between researchers and the people who live with the biodiversity being studied. The researchers also committed to delivering results back to the communities, a promise that shaped the entire architecture of the project and ultimately produced the outreach collections at the heart of the new paper.

The depth of local knowledge became apparent early. In a first meeting with the comisariado, the community authority, the researchers encountered an encyclopedic command of the natural history of the sacred mountain Zempoaltépetl, so extensive that it prompted reflection on what science might still be missing. In informal conversations, community members explained how they read environmental cues, such as the presence or behavior of particular animals, to time the planting and growing of food. These encounters convinced the team to integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Local Ecological Knowledge, known as TEK and LEK, into the research design rather than simply extracting data. TEK and LEK represent generations of accumulated understanding of ecosystems, species, and natural processes, and they are woven into cosmovisions, practices, and language. The researchers framed their work explicitly as co-learning, aiming for mutual education rather than a one-directional transfer of facts.

The methodology behind the outreach collections was meticulous. All specimens collected during standardized surveys in mountain regions including San Pablo Etla, Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, San José del Pacífico, San Esteban Río Hondo, San Esteban Atatlahuca, Huajuapan de León, and San Luis Amatlán were brought to the laboratory at Instituto de Ecología A.C. in Xalapa, Veracruz, where they were pinned and identified to species level. Representative specimens from each site were then curated into outreach collections, labeled with full location and date data like any scientific specimen, but with an added layer: local names and contextual information designed to engage the communities where the insects were found. The remaining vouchers were deposited in major institutional collections in Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, ensuring the scientific record remained intact while the outreach materials traveled a different path.

In workshops, three kinds of drawers were deployed. The first showcased the most recognizable insect orders and families, including butterflies and moths, bees, dragonflies and damselflies, mantises, and scarab beetles, giving participants familiar anchors before the material turned specialized. The second and third focused on dung beetles at the state and local levels respectively, allowing participants to see both regional diversity and the species living on their own land. Digital graphics, infographics featuring newly described species, and a series of six posters on dung beetle ecology supplemented the physical specimens. The format was deliberately interactive: researchers shared information about reproductive biology, ecosystem services, taxonomy, and curation, then asked attendees about common names, habitats, diets, and seasonal patterns, treating community members as experts in their own right rather than as an audience.

The linguistic findings illustrate why this exchange matters scientifically. In Tu’un Savi, the Mixtec language, dung beetles are called timirru shini ti yivi; in Ayuujk, the Mixe language, tsëkë ti’ny yumpë. Both names describe the action of pushing or carrying a ball of dung with the head, a precise behavioral observation embedded in the vocabulary itself. In Didze, the Zapotec language, no specific term for dung beetles emerged, but the word mingut refers generically to members of Scarabaeoidea. Horned beetles are often named toritos, little bulls, a category that can span several beetle families. Communities consistently associated dung beetles with the rainy season and forested areas and knew their burial behavior, while tunnel construction and larval stages were less familiar. Notably, the researchers found no evidence that dung beetles hold sacred or cultural significance in these communities, likely because, unlike fungi or agave, they are not a managed or used resource. Documenting these names required care: behavioral explanations of dung feeding proved essential for accurate identification, since verbal descriptions or pinned specimens alone often led to misidentifications, and community members verified spellings and translations to ensure respectful, accurate representation.

The outcomes extended well beyond nomenclature. Each community received a reference collection for its local library, along with posters, brochures, and educational materials, ensuring the knowledge remained accessible after the researchers left. Hands-on workshops for undergraduate students covered specimen preparation and species identification, and the team participated in local events ranging from a regional identity forum to a mushroom fair and a community assembly. Local teachers observed that students gained knowledge not typically covered in school curricula. An open communication channel through email and WhatsApp has persisted: students and teachers send photographs of insects and arachnids for identification, high school students ask about universities and scholarships, and community members request advice on land management, medicinal plants, and pest control. Community members also showed strong interest in recording species found on their lands, producing local checklists that remain in community libraries.

The researchers are candid about the challenges. Building trust takes time, which sits uneasily with academic pressures to publish and meet deadlines. Communities may deny access to their territories, local customs may make scheduling difficult, and researchers must adapt to the community’s agenda rather than the reverse, accepting that some objectives requiring broad participation may not be achieved. When no mutually beneficial agreement can be reached, the team insists, researchers must respect that decision and never enter a territory without explicit permission. The study also acknowledges the cultural and spiritual significance of sacred sites, which must be recognized as part of any access agreement. These constraints are presented not as obstacles to science but as conditions for doing it well in communally owned landscapes.

The broader lesson is one the authors hope will spread through biodiversity research generally. Outreach collections, they argue, are more than educational tools; they are shared spaces where scientific and cultural knowledge meet on equal terms. By integrating TEK and LEK into ecological research and respecting the agency of Indigenous communities, collections that once sat behind museum glass become connectors, strengthening the link between research and the people who steward the land it depends on. For a field facing an insect biodiversity crisis and shrinking public trust, the Oaxaca model offers a concrete, replicable template: rigorous taxonomy and community reciprocity are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing ones, and the future of ecological science may depend on practicing both at once.

Subject of Research: Community-based entomological outreach integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge with dung beetle research in Oaxaca, Mexico

Article Title: From collections to connections: empowering communities through entomological outreach

Article References: Cruz-García, B. J., Sandoval, O., Cruz-García, E. J., Escobar-Hernández, F., & Arriaga-Jiménez, A. (2025). From collections to connections: empowering communities through entomological outreach. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.147417

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.147417

Keywords: dung beetles, entomology, Oaxaca, Indigenous knowledge, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, outreach collections, knowledge exchange, biodiversity conservation, community engagement, science communication, Mexico, ethnobiology

Catalina Rico Lenta and Ana Ladio built their study around farmers who sell at the Nahuel Huapi Family Farmers’ Market, a hub of local food production in the Argentinian Andes. Drawing on extensive ethnobiological fieldwork, the researchers organized a participatory workshop in which farmers identified and ranked the Components of Change, or CoC, affecting their productive systems. Rather than treating drought, market pressures, or invasive species as isolated problems, participants described them as interconnected strands of a single web, each capable of triggering consequences that ripple across soils, water, crops, livestock, and household economies.

To translate this systemic local perspective into a measurable framework, the team developed a novel tool: the Locally-Anchored Impact Index, or LAII. The index integrates two dimensions for each Component of Change: the perceived severity of its impact and its degree of interconnectivity within the broader socioecological system. This approach represents a deliberate departure from conventional vulnerability indices that rely solely on external expert judgments or remotely sensed data. By weighting severity with connectivity, the LAII captures the cascading quality of risk, identifying which pressures are most likely to propagate disruption through the entire farming system.

The results are striking. Surface and groundwater flow dynamics and drought emerged as the most influential Components of Change, ranking highest in both perceived severity and interconnectivity. Water, in other words, functions as the central node of the regional risk network. Declining water availability does not merely stress irrigation; it reshapes pasture productivity, soil stability, forest health, fire regimes, and ultimately the viability of the family farm itself. The researchers found that climatic and ecological factors exerted a greater overall impact on the system than socio-economic pressures such as market volatility or land-use change, a finding that underscores how acutely environmental transformation is being felt on the ground.

One of the most consequential discoveries concerns the relationship between the diversity of adaptive practices and the magnitude of local impact. Higher values on the Locally-Anchored Impact Index were associated with a broader repertoire of adaptive responses, suggesting that farmers facing the most interconnected pressures have also developed the richest portfolios of strategies. Climatic Components of Change mobilized the widest range of responses of any category, while ecological and socio-economic pressures elicited distinct, more specialized sets of adaptation practices. This pattern supports a growing body of resilience theory holding that pathway diversity, the availability of multiple viable responses, is a key determinant of a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance without losing its essential functions.

Adaptation, in this context, is not a modern imposition but an extension of long-standing Local Ecological Knowledge, or LEK. The farmers’ responses are grounded in generations of local learning, experimentation, and knowledge exchange. Ethnobiological research in Patagonia has repeatedly documented how smallholders read animals, birds, and plants as ethno-indicators of environmental change, manage firewood and soil resources with detailed local taxonomies, and maintain agrobiodiversity as a buffer against uncertainty. The new study extends this tradition by showing that knowledge transmission pathways themselves differ according to the type of pressure at hand. Climatic stresses, ecological disturbances, and economic shifts each draw on distinct channels through which practices and insights move between generations and across families.

This finding carries significant implications for how adaptation policy is designed in rural Latin America and beyond. Much of the existing literature on farmer perceptions of climate change treats adaptation as a relatively uniform response to generalized climatic stress. The Patagonian evidence suggests instead that the social architecture of knowledge, who teaches whom, in what settings, and through which relationships, is integral to the adaptive process. Interventions that ignore these pathways risk delivering information in forms that never take root. Conversely, supporting existing knowledge networks, including the market institutions that bring farmers together, may be among the most cost-effective strategies for building regional resilience.

The broader context gives the findings added urgency. Recent research documents rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns across the North Patagonian Andes, projections of increasing fire probability under twenty-first-century climate scenarios, and accelerating land-use transformation around protected areas in both Argentina and Chile. Family farming systems in the region sit at the intersection of these pressures, contending simultaneously with a warming and drying climate, fire-driven pine invasions, volcanic ash events such as the 2011 Cordón Caulle eruption, tourism-driven development, and the economic precarity characteristic of smallholder agriculture throughout the Global South. The systemic perspective of local farmers, the study argues, is not folk wisdom to be accommodated but an analytically sophisticated account of precisely these cascading dynamics.

Methodologically, the LAII offers a transferable framework for participatory assessment of socio-environmental change in other regions where smallholder livelihoods depend on intimate knowledge of local ecosystems. Because the index is built from locally perceived severity and interconnectivity, it can be adapted to contexts as varied as Andean altiplano communities, African mountain regions, or Mediterranean watersheds, all places where comparable studies have shown that local knowledge reveals patterns invisible to conventional monitoring. The researchers emphasize that the approach treats family farmers as active agents rather than passive victims of change, in line with contemporary decolonizing currents in ethnobiology that position local communities as co-producers of environmental science.

For the farmers of the Nahuel Huapi basin, the study confirms what their daily experience already teaches: water is the thread that binds every risk together, and the knowledge networks that carry adaptive practices from one family to the next are as vital to survival as any well or canal. For scientists and policymakers, the message is equally clear. Effective adaptation will require tools that measure risk the way the people who live with it actually experience it, as a connected, cascading system in which the fate of a single stream can determine the fate of a farm, a market, and a way of life.

Subject of Research: Locally grounded assessment of cascading socio-environmental risks and adaptation in Patagonian family farming systems

Article Title: Cascading Socio-environmental Risks In Northern Patagonia: A Locally Anchored Assessment From Family Farming Systems

Article References: Rico Lenta, C., & Ladio, A. (2026). Cascading Socio-environmental Risks In Northern Patagonia: A Locally Anchored Assessment From Family Farming Systems. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02619-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02619-6

Keywords: family farming, Northern Patagonia, water scarcity, Local Ecological Knowledge, participatory assessment, socio-environmental change, drought, adaptation strategies, resilience, ethnobiology, impact index, socioecological systems