The roles, significance and sustainability of wild plant and fungal non-timber forest product use in southern Africa: a systematic review

• We undertook a systematic search of NTFPs studies using Scopus and Web of Science. • We summarise the information for 12 different plant and fungal NTFP and as a whole. • There is still high use of a wide diversity of NTFPs throughout southern Africa. • Very few studies investigated the ecological sustainability of NTFP use. • There is a dire need for more longitudinal and hypothesis driven research. Southern Africa is rich in cultural- and bio-diversity, which underpins the extensive use of wild plant and fungal resources for cultural, consumptive, income and safety-net purposes. The collection, use, management and knowledge of wild plant and fungal resources, commonly termed non-timber forest products (NTFPs), has been studied by multiple academic disciplines over decades, but rarely brought together across resource types and uses. Here we report on a PRISMA systematic review of the literature on such use in southern Africa (countries south of the Cunene and Zambezi rivers) to ascertain (i) the extent of research on the use of NTFPs in local livelihoods and (ii) whether it is ecologically sustainable. We conducted 13 separate searches using Scopus and Web of Science, corresponding to one on general use of NTFPs in livelihoods and 12 others for specific NTFP types (medicinal plants; fuelwood; wild fruits; wild vegetables, building timber; weaving fibres; wood for tools/crafts; thatch; oils/resins/saps; broom materials; mushrooms; wild flowers/pods/seeds). The 13 searches resulted in 435 unique articles for review, with most on medicinal plants, fuelwood, wild fruits and wild vegetables (all > 50 articles). There was a clear increasing trend in the number of publications through time. Most of the publications (62.3 %) were from South Africa, followed by 14 % from Zimbabwe, with the other five countries individually accounting for between 2.1 % and 7.4 %. We summarise the core findings per NTFP type. Generally, very few of the studies considered the ecological sustainability of the NTFPs used, and of those that did, most were based on user perceptions of changes in NTFP abundance. Formal longitudinal studies of NTFP use and availability are scarce in the region, as are those investigating cultural uses of NTFPs. Overall, we find that NTFP use is widespread for consumptive, economic, and cultural reasons with only limited evidence of declines in use in the face of multiple contextual changes over the last 2–3 decades at both local and wider scales.