“A large bull moose raises his head in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Moose are a hallmark species of the north woods and can be difficult to find. Canon-endorsed photographer Tomas Koeck spent weeks tracking this particular bull until a scenic September morning yielded success.”

By Giulia Mattalia, Alex McAlvay, Irene Teixidor-Toneu, Jessica Lukawiecki, Faisal Moola, Zemede Asfaw, Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, Sandra Díaz, F. Merlin Franco, Benjamin S. Halpern, Casey O’Hara, Delphine Renard, Yadav Uprety, Jeffrey Wall, Noelia Zafra-Calvo, Victoria Reyes-García.

Read the full paper here.

The cultural keystone species are those “species that shape in a major way the cultural identity of a people” as defined by Garibaldi and Turner in 2004. This concept has been proposed to frame together cultural and ecological salience in a specific context. However, the concept of cultural keystone species was very limitedly applied in biodiversity conservation possibly due to its blurred and prolific definitions. This literature review examines the term “cultural keystone species” to explore its operationalization for biodiversity conservation. We reviewed 1251 publications in English and selected the 313 which mentioned the concept and were published by the end of 2022. The main findings of our review confirm the absence of a systematic and precise way of documenting cultural keystone species precluding global cross-cultural comparisons. Our review also reveals a biased geographical distribution with 47% of all the “cultural keystone species” reported located in North America. Finally, our results indicate a fair acknowledgement of cultural keystone species nature’s contributions to people (especially supporting people’s identity), but a small number of articles describing the contributions of the sociocultural group to the survival and conservation of the associated species.

Therefore, to contribute to the operationalization of the cultural keystone species concept, we suggest two proposals. First, to clearly define them as an indissoluble combination of a non-human species and one or more sociocultural groups. Second, to acknowledge that species and sociocultural group relations should be classified in a continuum rather than a dichotomy and that these relations between the species and sociocultural group are explicitly reciprocal.