Defining cultural functional groups based on perceived traits assigned to birds

The sustainable delivery of ecosystem services relies on the functional traits that underpin ecosystem service production. Organisms that share functional traits can be grouped together, simplifying questions of management and providing insights into the external drivers that impact ecosystem service provision. Linkages between the functional traits of organisms and provisioning and regulating ecosystem services are well established, but the traits that underpin the benefits derived from cultural ecosystem services are not. To this end we interviewed 401 socio–economically diverse local ecosystem users in South Africa, selected using a mixture of convenience and purposive sampling, to elucidate peoples’ perceptions of the traits associated with bird species. Subsequently, we used cluster analysis to examine whether these traits could provide a consistent typology of cultural functional groups. We identified six major cultural functional groups based on scores assigned to bird species: Visual Traits; Negative Visual and Behavioural Traits; Movement and Ecological Traits; Place Association and Abundance Indicators; Common Traits; and Behavioural Traits. Significantly higher scores were assigned to birds with interesting movement and ecology, whereas bird species with perceived negative visual or behavioural traits scored poorly. We additionally show that there are potential synergies between positively perceived cultural functions and ecological functions. Grounding cultural functional traits in a broader typology of functional groups makes components of ecological complexity more interpretable and may be used to predict how the loss of functional traits within a system will impact cultural benefits experienced by local ecosystem users.