By Julia G. de Aledo, Hans ter Steege, Luis Cayuela, Laura Matas-Granados, Celina Ben Saadi, Norma Salinas, María de los Ángeles La Torre-Cuadros, Selene Báez, Guillermo Bañares-de-Dios, Leslie Cayola, Belén Fadrique, William Farfán-Rios, Alfredo Fuentes, Jürgen Homeier, Oswaldo Jadán, J. Sebastián Tello, and Manuel J. Macía.
Tropical forests provide many useful plants that support people’s well-being. Learning what makes certain plants preferred for specific uses helps us understand the connections between people, culture, and ecosystems. In our study, we investigated over 1,900 tropical plant species and how different Indigenous communities use them in western Amazonia. Speaking directly with community members we learned that they used plants for utensils, rituals, medicines, timber, clothing, among other things. These uses represent the essential services the forest provides, contributing to Indigenous peoples’ well-being and preservation of traditional knowledge.
We wanted to understand if certain traits of the plants (like their size, leaf thickness, or presence of resins) influenced the way people use them. We indeed discovered that many of these characteristics are crucial in shaping cultures and bodies of knowledge. Specifically, we found that plant functional traits are key providing materials, food, health, and security, showing multiple interconnections. For example, reproductive traits were strongly linked to food, beverages, and to dyes to plaint the body or textiles. The plant’s life form (whether a plant is a liana, a palm, or a tree) was tightly associated to cultural expression uses, such as clothing, aesthetics and rituals. Wood density was mainly associated with recreational materials and fiber production. Finally, plant size resulted to be an important factor for the uses in construction, medicines, or domestic utensils. When we examined different communities independently, we found that the traits important for essential uses, were often selected similarly across the different Indigenous groups, a phenomenon we call “functional selection convergence”, although separated by large distances. However, in some cases, there were divergent uses that could be due to independent discoveries or the unique traditions and needs of each community.
Our research tries to understand the complex relationships between the provision of ecosystem services and the demand for them in tropical forests. It highlights the importance of ethnobotany in understanding these relationships and emphasizes the need to preserve the species with certain functional and morphological characteristics critical for local traditions and systems of knowledge. By recognizing and integrating Indigenous knowledge into ecological research, we can better sustain the forests and the communities that rely on them.
Relational Thinking 