A new article in the journal BioScience argues that the stewardship practices of Indigenous Peoples and other place-based knowledge holders have been systematically underrepresented in both conservation research and international policy along with the knowledge holders and practitioner themselves—and that correcting this imbalance is essential to more effective and equitable biodiversity governance.
The article, led by Giulia Mattalia and Irene Teixidor-Toneu, coauthored by 19 researchers spanning five continents, proposes a comprehensive framework identifying distinct biophysical stewardship practices, organized across three levels of ecological organization: target species, assemblages of species, and whole ecosystems. The framework is illustrated through an extensive review of the cultural keystone species (CKS) literature, which refers to species defined as "culturally salient species that shape in a major way the cultural identity of a people, as reflected in the fundamental roles these species have in diet, materials, medicine, and/or spiritual practices."
Across 242 articles surveyed, the authors identified 343 reports of stewardship practices directed toward nearly 1,000 cultural keystone species, alongside 1,652 reports of nature's contributions to people. Yet the synthesis reveals a telling asymmetry: only half of CKS articles that document what nature provides to people also document what people provide to nature in return. The authors attribute this gap in part to what they describe as a paradigm rooted in Eurocentric perspectives, or one in which "these types of management are often invisible to academics."
The review spans case studies from Ecuador to Switzerland, Nepal to Canada, illustrating how practices such as controlled burning, translocation, selective harvest, and habitat modification not only sustain culturally vital species but cascade through broader social-ecological systems. In North America, where 60% of all stewardship reports in the data set originate, burning alone accounts for 30% of the documented practices.
The authors situate their framework within urgent global policy conversations, noting that stewardship practices remain underacknowledged in instruments such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. "Strengthening Indigenous, local, and other place-based stewardship practices within scientific and policy settings," they write, "could contribute to more effective and inclusive conservation." Their proposed classification, they argue, can serve as a shared language across disciplines: "Integrating stewardship practices into biodiversity conservation research and practice would facilitate consideration of biodiversity stewards along with biodiversity itself."
The article is available now in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biag047).
