- New research assesses in detail the contributions of wildlife to people.
- Humanity relies on an array of ecosystem services for well-being and survival, but the provision of these services rely not just on vegetation but also the wild animals that inhabit the same ecosystems.
- They found that vertebrate wildlife on land and in freshwater and marine environments support 12 of the 18 categories of nature’s contributions to people set forth by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
- The authors say that accounting for wildlife along with measures of ecosystems such as vegetation cover will provide a more complete picture of their health and help guide decision-making aiming to ensure that those ecosystems continue to provide critical services to people.
In October 2020, the hoofbeats of American bison thumped across the prairie of the Rosebud Reservation for the first time in more than a century. Years in the works, the release of 100 bison (Bison bison) in the U.S. state of South Dakota resulted from a collaboration between the Sicangu Lakota Oyate Nation, WWF and the U.S. Department of the Interior. The goal was to bring a critical species back to the North American Great Plains, from which they’d nearly been exterminated in the 1800s.
In doing so, the hope was to reinvigorate the relationships between North America’s largest land animal, the landscape and its people. For the Indigenous Sicangu Lakota Oyate, the release marked a resurgent spiritual connection, one based on an ancient kinship they share with the bison.
The return is expected to reap more quantifiable rewards, too. Thanks to their habits and bulk, bison shape the environment in unique and profound ways. Their hooves aerate the soil, stimulating the growth of grasses, which pull carbon from the atmosphere. Their restless feeding habits and predilection for wallowing leave behind pockets of habitat favored by a variety of birds. And their dung and urine leave behind nutrients and seeds.
The Rosebud Reservation bison offer just one example of how bringing back wildlife to a landscape enhances the value of what scientists call nature’s contributions to people (NCPs), according to Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, WWF’s global biodiversity lead scientist.
“Without some rewilding — without, in this case, bringing back this keystone species — you’re not going to get the same benefits” as you would from only protecting the land, Chaplin-Kramer told Mongabay.
In new research, she and her colleagues set out to understand in detail wildlife’s contributions to people, or WCPs, the world over.
To begin, the team combed through ecological research for examples of how wild vertebrates on land, in freshwater and marine environments affect people. Of course, wildlife’s impacts aren’t always positive for people. In parts of the world, for example, the threats that large, free-roaming herbivores pose to crops are certainly viewed negatively by farmers. But the team also cataloged research demonstrating the often invisible benefits animals provide to people.
They then mapped these impacts onto an NCP classification system first laid out in 2018 by IPBES, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
Chaplin-Kramer’s team found that wildlife is integral to at least 12 of IPBES’s 18 NCPs. Examples of NCPs supported by wildlife include the creation of habitat and the regulation of water, as well as the inspiration people get from seeing animals in their environment and the importance of species to cultural identity.
The researchers published their findings in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Reviews Biodiversity on Jan. 15.
But why focus on NCPs? Chaplin-Kramer explained that, while satellite imagery and remote sensing are typically the go-to method for measuring ecosystem health, “That’s not necessarily the most important component of what we actually care about.” She and her colleagues cautioned that when scientists use only remote sensing to assess the important services ecosystems offer to humanity, the world’s “wildlife was getting left behind.”
That’s because researchers often use vegetation cover as a proxy for ecosystem health. But that doesn’t account for the added value offered by the species that inhabit those places. And critically, overlooking the contributions of wildlife in the present day could result in those species not being prized and actively protected, which could mean their services disappear in the future as populations fall, then vanish.
“We often keep species and ecosystem targets separate in monitoring,” Chaplin-Kramer said, adding that we risk “winding up with empty forests.”
“Maybe we keep our forest cover, but they’re devoid of the life that actually provides the benefits that we’re used to receiving,” she said.
This is especially concerning due to the drastic declines seen in wildlife planetwide. Scientists say we’re living through the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, this time propelled by human activity, with some species dying out altogether and the populations of others dwindling at worrying rates. WWF’s 2024 Living Planet report tracked a 73% decline in wildlife numbers globally. A 2023 study calculated that 48% of all vertebrates are trending downward, while a new study published Jan. 8 revealed that around 25% of freshwater animals could go extinct, including fish on which human communities rely for food.
“A species extinction is a travesty,” Chaplin-Kramer said, “but just lowering their abundances is when we’re going to start to see declining function.”
While that’s concerning, she noted that surviving populations also provide an opportunity: “These declines are something we can reverse, [and] can do something about,” Chaplin-Kramer said. “It’s not too late.”
Some benefits that wildlife offer are more obvious than others — the food fish provide to people, for example. Others are harder to recognize or quantify, though often no less important. Think the cultural value the American bison embodies for the First Nations of the American plains, or the way in which restored bison populations improve grassland habitat and carbon storage — a hedge against human-caused climate change.
“Having a broad and diverse assessment of wildlife contributions to people is valuable because, as the authors point out, many contributions are not immediately visible and can be indirect,” said Sarah Weiskopf, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center, in an email. “This can make them easy to overlook and lead to unintended consequences of [policy] decisions.”
Lacking a complete picture of the services nature provides, including the species integral to those services, could result in inadequate or misdirected land protection, land use, and species conservation initiatives.
“Many studies mapping and projecting nature’s contributions to people do not explicitly consider biodiversity, especially wildlife, which can lead to overly optimistic assessments,” Weiskopf said. “Accurate understanding of nature’s contributions to people and how drivers of change will affect nature’s contributions … are important for developing effective policies to meet conservation and sustainable development goals.”
Achieving this deep understanding is no easy matter, but it’s a goal Chaplin-Kramer said is attainable. She pointed to the 21st-century research methods that have “gone gangbusters” in teasing apart ecosystem services as a useful WCP model. Techniques such as eDNA, acoustic monitoring and camera traps could fill in the knowledge gaps about what wild species bring to ecosystems. New satellites slated to be deployed in 2025 by NASA, the U.S. space agency, could also provide a more detailed view from above.
“I’m super optimistic,” Chaplin-Kramer said. The study’s authors say they hope stronger links between wildlife and the enriching services they offer to humanity will lead to more effective conservation policies.
Many conservationists are advocating urgency to ensure needed resources are put in place quickly to protect biodiversity and, by extension, wildlife services. And that process appears to be moving ahead, though more slowly than some would wish. Nearly half the conservation goals set by the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) cited ecosystem services and NCPs. But the October 2024 COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, left many wanting a stronger GBF commitment by the world’s nations, especially financially. There are hopes for more progress at the upcoming resumption of U.N. biodiversity discussions in Rome starting Feb. 25.
It’s still early days for the American bison to begin replicating the sorts of ecological engineering feats that the species brought to the prairie in earlier times. But scientists say they expect restoration to act as a demonstration of how species elevate ecosystems for the benefit of humanity.
“We have to be reframing the way that we talk about ecosystem services so that it includes species because we can’t miss those opportunities,” Chaplin-Kramer said. “There’s just too little time.”
Banner image: Plains bison in the background at the Wolakota Bison Release on the Rosebud-Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Image © Clay Bolt / WWF-US.
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Citations:
Chaplin-Kramer, R., Miller, C. R., Dee, L. E., Bennett, N. J., Echeverri, A., Gould, R. K., … Zhao, J. (2025). Wildlife’s contributions to people. Nature Reviews Biodiversity, 1(1), 68-81. doi:10.1038/s44358-024-00006-9
Díaz, S., Pascual, U., Stenseke, M., Martín-López, B., Watson, R. T., Molnár, Z., . . . Shirayama, Y. (2018). Assessing nature’s contributions to people. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aap8826
Sayer, C. A., Fernando, E., Jimenez, R. R., Macfarlane, N. B., Rapacciuolo, G., Böhm, M., . . . Darwall, W. R. (2025). One-quarter of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction. Nature, 1-8. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08375-z
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