Across the forests of Ecuador, the grasslands of Canada, and the mountains of Nepal, Indigenous Peoples and local stewards have spent centuries tending the land in ways that Western science is only now learning to see. A sweeping new study published in BioScience reveals that these time-tested practices—from controlled burning to selective harvesting to habitat modification—have been quietly left out of the global conversation about how to protect nature, even as they sustain both irreplaceable species and the cultures that depend on them.
The research, led by Giulia Mattalia and Irene Teixidor-Toneu with contributions from 19 scientists across five continents, exposes a critical blind spot in conservation. After reviewing 242 scientific articles, the authors documented 343 reports of stewardship practices aimed at nearly 1,000 cultural keystone species—those species so deeply woven into a people's identity, diet, medicine, and spiritual life that losing them would unravel the cultural fabric itself. Yet here's the gap that matters: only half of the studies that described what nature gives to people also documented what people actively do to sustain nature in return.
That invisibility isn't accidental. The authors attribute it to what they call Eurocentric thinking in conservation research, where Indigenous and place-based management systems remain, quite literally, invisible to the academic eye. The consequences ripple outward. When the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was drafted—the international roadmap for protecting nature through 2030—these stewardship practices were conspicuously absent, despite their proven track record.
The data tells a compelling story. In North America alone, where 60 percent of all documented stewardship practices originate, controlled burning accounts for 30 percent of the work. Think of the precision required: lighting fires at exactly the right season, in exactly the right pattern, to regenerate grasslands, promote the growth of food plants, and maintain the habitat conditions that culturally vital species need to thrive. This isn't preservation in the preservationist sense—keeping nature untouched behind a fence. It's active, intentional, multigenerational care.
The framework Mattalia and Teixidor-Toneu propose offers a shared language that bridges disciplines and ways of knowing. By organizing stewardship practices across three levels—individual species, assemblages of species, and entire ecosystems—it creates space for Indigenous knowledge and academic science to speak to each other rather than past each other. The authors are clear about what's at stake: "Integrating stewardship practices into biodiversity conservation research and practice would facilitate consideration of biodiversity stewards along with biodiversity itself."
What makes this study timely is its insistence that effectiveness and equity aren't separate goals. Indigenous stewards have sustained some of Earth's most biodiverse regions for millennia. Recognizing their role isn't just morally right—it's strategically essential. As global biodiversity continues to decline, the world needs every tool, every practice, every deeply rooted relationship with the land that actually works. The 343 documented stewardship practices represent not historical artifacts to be archived but living systems ready to be fully integrated into the future of conservation.