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Sustainability of wild plant use in the Andean Community of South America

Kor, L; Homewood, K; Dawson, TP; Diazgranados, M; (2021) Sustainability of wild plant use in the Andean Community of South America. Ambio 10.1007/s13280-021-01529-7. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Overexploitation is the second biggest driver of global plant extinction. Meanwhile, useful plant species are vital to livelihoods across the world, with global conservation efforts increasingly applying the concept of ‘conservation-through-use.’ However, successfully balancing conservation and biodiversity use remains challenging. We reviewed literature on the sustainability of wild-collected plant use across the countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia—a region of global importance for its biological and cultural richness. After applying defined search terms and a two-stage screening process, 68 articles were reviewed. The numbers which reported sustainable, unsustainable, or context-dependent outcomes were relatively even, but national differences emerged. Through narrative synthesis, we identified five key, reoccurring themes: plant biology; land tenure; knowledge, resource, and capacity; economics and market pressures; and institutional structures, policy, and legislation. Our results show the need for flexible, context-specific approaches and the importance of collaboration, with bottom-up management and conservation methods involving local communities and traditional ecological knowledge often proving most effective.

Type: Article
Title: Sustainability of wild plant use in the Andean Community of South America
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s13280-021-01529-7
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01529-7
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Conservation-through-use, Ethnobotany, Natural resource use, NTFP, Plant conservation, Useful plants
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10126590
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