Abstract
The ecological apparency hypothesis tests how humans select plants. It is important to distinguish whether an “apparent” plant is the ecologically dominant species or simply the one perceived as most available by people. Additionally, plants’ evolutionary history influences their prevalence and human preference, based on shared traits and common ancestors. Thus, considering evolutionary history can tease apart factors that drive the use of plants by humans. Here, we investigated whether the perceived availability of plants is a better predictor of their use value than phytosociological parameters. We estimated rural farmers’ perception of the availability of the most important woody species locally and carried out a phytosociological survey in the surrounding forest fragments. We incorporated the phylogenetic relationships among useful species to shed light on the potential effect of plant shared ancestry on the use value. We observed that the availability perception of resources is more crucial in predicting the use value of species than their ecological availability, even when accounting for phylogenetic relatedness. Our findings suggest that use value in ethnobiology is closely linked to perceived resource availability, and it may impact our comprehension of the ecological apparency hypothesis.
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Data Availability
All data are available in supplementary information. The plants collected are in Herbarium IPA – Dárdano de Andrade Lima, under botanical record catalogs 46/2022 and 71/2022.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the entire Cutia Community for their hospitality during the data collection period, with special attention to Iara, Aurinha, and their families, and to Ina Vandebroek (Editor-in-Chief, Economic Botany) and the reviewers for the excellent work done.
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This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior — Brasil (CAPES) — Finance Code 001. MAR also received productivity grant (305309/2019-6) awarded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).
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TBBS and MAR designed the study, and WSFJ and TGS contributed with methodological adjustment and data analyses. The date collect was conducted by TBBS, and all authors carried data interpretation and writing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Sousa, T.B.B., Ferreira-Júnior, W.S., Gonçalves-Souza, T. et al. The Perception of Availability Explains the Use Value of Plants: Investigating the Ecological Apparency Hypothesis. Econ Bot (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12231-024-09609-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12231-024-09609-x