The Soviet regime had a particularly brutal impact on tradition, language, land use and life ways. Between 1945-1991 Soviet policy required nationalization, including mass collectivization of farms . Forests were transferred to the state, and private plots of land were joined into collective farms. All land was surrendered and tilled for the benefit of the larger state . During this era, clearing of Carpathian forests for agricultural development, specifically kolhospy, led to habitat fragmentation, leading to of planted spruce monoculture forests . How did these land management policies impact the gathering of plants and mushrooms? Ethnobotanical gathering practices did not stop under any colonial rule. However, these policies impacted the extent of access to land and forests where these species live, thereby shifting relationships to land and environment . Scholars state that Soviet policies also caused hybridization of Soviet knowledge into local ethnobotanical knowledge in Ukraine . After the historic collapse of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of workers faced unemployment, which catalyzed rural depopulation and migration for work outside of Ukraine . This migration also led to the decline of traditional agricultural systems, which also changed the landscape, causing the reduction of secondary grasslands . In response and despite all these stressors, Hutsul communities’ reflexive response continues to be subsistence farming along with a gathering of wild species, fishing, and game. Today, ecosystem challenges include illegal and destructive logging, the rise of ecotourism and accompanying infrastructure development, commercial harvesting of wild species, and climate change impacts . Introduction of Ukraine to the market economy has resulted in the privatization of state properties leading to the rise of ski resorts in the region. As the main regional challenge,vertical farming supplies illegal logging is managed by organized criminal networks under the guise of semi-legitimate businesses and corporations .

The main avenues of illegality include falsification of paperwork along the supply chain, as well as fraud and collusion with government officials . Minimal legal and financial penalties tend to make these activities fairly appealing within organized crime networks. However, more recently, the use of multi-time satellite images, DNA and isotope analyses of wood, along local citizen activism has helped combat illegal logging in the region. . According to local Hutsul knowledge holders, logging in this region encourages succession of species such as Rubus idaeus, Rubus caesius, Vaccinium myrtillus, Chamaerion angustifolium, Orchis macula, and Aronia melanocarpa. These species are used, appreciated, and gathered fairly frequently but they are also noted to be highly invasive and hinder forest growth. The gathering of these species helps curb their encroachment. Illegal logging also impacts mushroom growth and nutrient cycling, weakening overall forest health. Additionally, Hutsul knowledge holders stress the impacts of external commercial harvesting of culturally important species including Vaccinium myrtillus, Arnica montana, Cetraria islandica, and Gentiana lutea has increased in recent years. Commercial harvesting of important NTFPs raises concerns expressed by communities impacted by these practices worldwide, including: 1) intensified impacts on habitats, 2) increased harvest volumes, 3) restricted access to land, as well as 4) changes in financial and technological incentives promoting intensive harvesting . In this context, commercial harvesting impacts the curative qualities of medicinal plants harvested, reduces accessibility to habitats and availability of these culturally important species to local Hutsul populations. Lastly, the convergence of colonial policies of forest mismanagement and rising threats of climate change have compounded the rise of pine bark beetle invasion. With all these factors impacting culturally important habitats such as woodlands and forests, relationship to land have been continually challenged and threatened by external governance structures. Accessibility to place in Hutsulschyna, a socio-ecological-political issue, is beginning to be addressed through the reconciliation of harmful historic forest management practices and illegal logging practices.

Despite these continual and traumatic eco-cultural-political stressors, the dialogue between landscape and Hutsul communities has not weakened. It through the continual gathering of wild and cultivated species that relationship, community needs, traditional food, and place remain intertwined and inseparable . It is the ecology of the forest understory that provides both culturally important plants and mushrooms providing for multiple needs such as food and medicine nested in cultural practice. Hutsul management of polonynas or alpine meadows, harbors successive sets of plant communities and important root medicines like arnica , and Gentian root species . In general, floral composition of polonynas is incredibly diverse, harboring a high proportion of species and habitats that are almost completely absent in the forest belt below. Ultimately, the diversity of habitats in Hutsulshchyna – garden, roadside, field, pasture, meadow, woodland, forest, toloka, alpine meadow and polonyna – provide a range of landscape interaction as well as a diversity of species use and reliance. By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches, a more synthesized and community driven understanding of the role of ethnobotany surrounding the cultural historical center of Hutsulshchnya of Verkhovyna arises. As this study shows, an integrated qualitative and quantitative approach is necessary to elucidate the context of ethnobotanical use and communityuse implications surrounding responses to historic and present ecosystem challenges. Quantitative ethnobotanical indices , Cultural Importance , Frequency of Citation , Number of Uses , Relative Frequency of Citation , Relative Importance ) reveal information about 108 species from 79 genera and 48 families including 23 species of cultivated plants, 9 species of mushrooms and 2 species of lichens. Carpathian forests, mountains, woodlands, fields, alpine meadows, pastures, meadows, polonynas, tolokas, and roadsides serve as a biocultural reservoir for wild plant, mushroom, and lichen species while home gardens serve as places of experimentation of domesticating wild species and diversification of therapeutic remedies using cultivated species. Gathering serves multiple purposes with the overarching theme of addressing community health needs in the form of preventative care, quality control of ingredients, and surplus in times of scarcity. Although Hutsulshchyna is split between two countries, certain medicinal species uses transcend borders, grounding TEK to place.

Shared medicinal uses include 13 species that are noted in the top 20 species of cultural importance according to indices explored. Additionally, there were 35 unique place-based plants and corresponding uses that ground this TEK in the cultural, historic center of Hutsulshchyna, Verkhovyna. Lastly, unique to this study, “ecological use” was created as an attempt to integrate TEK into quantitative ethnobotanical indices, failing to capture both the depth and richness of knowledge. TEK is explored through qualitative methods including participant observation and community-based participatory action research, elucidating meaning to the role of place, phenology and gathering methods present in Hutsulshchyna. The range of accessibility to habitats in forest-dependent communities is imperative especially if it serves as a relational thread to food, medicine, and ecological grounding in cultural practice. Future indices acknowledging the variance of accessibility in today’s rapidly environmentally changing world could inform broader policy initiatives. Acknowledging TEK goes beyond the use of the organism and acknowledges derivation of place that sustains the stewardship and future accessibility of species . It is the link between use, stewardship, and culture. Typical agricultural systems attempt to control extraneous variables in order to maximize output of yield, while traditional management cultures are based on a locally-based, small-scale approaches that center interaction with natural components of the environment. The resulting system is an ethnoecosystem that embeds management as a relationship between environmental interactions and cultural practice. Current regional ecosystem challenges like illegal logging, commercial harvesting, and climate change, as well as the ripple effects of historical, colonial, environmental practices, continue to impact gathering practices and conservation status of endangered culturally important plants and their habitats. If a plant is culturally important, then the habitat or ecosystem in which it grows is by extension important. The Hutsul cultural practice of maintaining polonynas, a culturally important ecosystem, is declining,cannabis indoor greenhouse and with it the survival of plant and lichen communities that are conjoined in song, celebration, use, and cultural importance. By contextualizing the cultural importance of plants, lichens and mushrooms into their broader ecology and relationality with communities, we can learn to create meaningful stewardship policies that directly address ecosystem challenges and prioritize conservation measures. Climate change impacts, including but not limited to extreme weather events, the rise of global temperatures, and pandemic zoonotic diseases , remind us of our interconnectedness with our local and global ecosystems. With impacts not evenly distributed across the globe but felt more drastically over land, the poles, and more arid regions , areas already experiencing food insecurity will be hit hardest. Growing challenges, such as competition for finite resources including accessible, arable land minerals, water, and energy along with current, global, environmental, and economic changes are already impacting food production in response to climate change. This reality deserves attention and thoughtful, mindful action, especially for marginalized communities worldwide, specifically Indigenous Peoples and underrepresented ethnic groups, who may experience these impacts more immediately. Many Indigenous and underrepresented ethnic communities are both societally and spatially marginalized, living in edged biomes near forests, oceans, and deserts. According to the World Bank , these same communities steward an estimated 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Additionally, they are over represented among the world’s poorest, most destitute, and illiterate populations, as well as those displaced or threatened by environmental encroachment, wars, disasters, and socio-political stressors . Yet, many of these communities still survive and thrive, with resilience. In this case study, Hutsul communities, an ethnographic group of traditional pastoral highlanders in the eastern Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, exemplify a socio-ecological approach to maintaining regional food system resilience and equity. Hutsuls have survived, thrived, and adapted in the face of colonial invasions, wars, food shortages, and now synergistic impacts of climate change and illegal timber harvest causing an increase of flooding events. Many Hutsul communities in the Carpathian Mountains are guided by traditional ecological knowledge in their day-to-day lives. Lived and experienced by local and Indigenous communities worldwide, TEK is cultural, spiritual, intergenerational, dynamic, place-based, environmental knowledge and wisdom; TEK, as a living knowledge base, is revisited, reinterpreted, and reevaluated consistently . TEK, the scientific method brought to life through culture, plays a significant role in meeting community needs, while adapting to environmental changes.

TEK serves as the foundational base for ensuring resilience in communities. TEK is built upon personal stories, past traumas, innovations, and current realities to inform contextually driven, resilient responses that are aligned with community needs. The path to achieving food security has a socio-ecological foundation, one that grafts community needs with a resilient, ecologically-grounded approach known as food sovereignty. Food sovereignty, as a term, can be controversial in its various meanings and origins . Here, we refer to the definition stated in the Declaration of Nyeleni of the Forum of Food Sovereignty in 2007. “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” Within this definition emerges a powerful recognition of self-determination in how food is grown, managed and sourced. In addition, it affirms that socio-ecological relationships, rooted in sustainability, are central to this type of food system. Lastly, it states that access to healthy environments and culturally important foods are inextricably linked. Food sovereignty is not an endpoint in achieving food security; rather, it is an ongoing, adaptive capacity for a community to overcome food system threats. Adaptive capacity includes both coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies . Referring to terms commonly used in developmental studies and anthropology , coping mechanisms are short-term, quickly implemented strategies to situations that threaten livelihoods. Conversely, adaptive strategies are long-term changes implemented by communities, modifying local rules, institutions, and productive activities to ensure livelihoods. Coping mechanisms tend to emerge on individual or household levels, while adaptive strategies tend to emerge on community levels. Both coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies exist across temporal scales, whereby over time, coping mechanisms can become adaptive strategies . Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and long-term community based participatory action research , we identify 108 culturally important species and distinct regional environmental changes with Hutsul elders, knowledge holders, foresters, and experts. By combining quantitative ethnobotanical approaches examining species use with more in-depth qualitative approaches, we identify short-term and long term responses to regional, environmental changes resulting in the maintenance of traditional foods in Hutsul communities.