By Anna Stanworth, Kiole Imale, Brus Isua, Anne M. Anji, Francesca F. Dem, Vojtech Novotný, Harry E.R. Shepherd, Kelvin S.-H. Peh, and Rebecca J. Morris

Forest landscape, Ohu, Papua New Guinea. The community living in this landscape are intrinsically linked to nature, with both ecological and socioecological interactions providing and supporting ecosystem service flows. Photo credit: Anna Stanworth.

This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.

Ecosystems face a wide range of threats, including population growth, climate change and habitat loss. As ecosystems degrade, so do the services they provide, such as food, medicines, raw materials, climate and water regulation, and cultural values, estimated to be worth over $100 trillion annually. Understanding how these ecosystem services flow from nature to people is particularly important in communities that are directly reliant on natural resources to support livelihoods and wellbeing.

To better understand how benefits from natural resources reach people, we worked with a subsistence farming community in Papua New Guinea. Using local ecological knowledge about plant uses and species’ interactions, we built a network to map complex relationships between plants, animals, such as fruit-eating frugivores, and people. This allowed us to identify how different ecological and socioecological relationships help provide ecosystem services.

Our findings show that some plant species are particularly important, not just because they directly provide food or medicine to the local community, but because they help maintain the overall connectivity of the ecosystem service network. These plants are also often less replaceable, dominantly providing specific resources to the local community and playing a central role in linking biodiversity and human wellbeing. In short, plants that provide a higher proportion of food, cultural and financial benefits to the local community also contribute more to the resilience of the ecosystem service network.

By mapping these relationships between biodiversity, and biodiversity and humans, we can better understand how nature currently supports local communities and how future environmental and social changes, such as deforestation or shifting farming practices, might affect how nature benefits people.

Our findings highlight key species and farmers that could shape these relationships, offering insights for conservation and agricultural land management decisions. As we present a novel framework, we also critically assess our methods and results, exploring important lessons that we learned throughout our study, and how future studies can consider these lessons.