This week’s Naturalists’ World video explores the Southern Afrotropics and asks a deceptively simple question: what changes when we add nature’s unseen services to the economic story and what’s really at stake if we don’t?

Southern Africa is famous for its wildlife but what if tourism only captures part of its real value?

When ecotourism comes up, it’s often discussed in narrow terms: visitor numbers, park revenue, jobs created. Compared to mining, agriculture, or energy, wildlife-based tourism can look small, a modest slice of national GDP. It’s easy to conclude that its role in the economy is limited.

But in this week’s episode, we step back and ask a different question: what is ecotourism built on, and what other forms of value are being created at the same time?

The landscapes of the Southern Afrotropics didn’t evolve to be static or subdivided. They evolved under seasonal rain, long dry periods, fire, and constant movement. Large animals shaped vegetation. Grazing and browsing maintained open habitats. Fire reset the system again and again. Together, these processes kept landscapes productive without being converted or extracted.

Ecotourism depends on those systems remaining intact. But it doesn’t capture all of the value they produce.

Beyond tourism, intact ecosystems are quietly maintaining landscapes, supporting biodiversity, reducing degradation, and absorbing disturbance. These services don’t show up clearly on balance sheets, but they persist day after day, as long as the system remains connected and functional.

To understand what’s still happening on the ground, we zoomed out to the Southern Afrotropics region, spanning savannas, floodplains, woodlands, and grasslands across southern Africa. This is a region defined not by fences or borders, but by movement of animals, fire, and seasonal productivity.

Before modern development, wildlife moved freely across these landscapes, shaping them in ways that supported both diversity and resilience. In many places, those processes are still operating, and we can see them in real time.

Across the region, people are documenting plants and animals on iNaturalist, day by day, revealing where ecosystems remain intact and where connections are beginning to fray. Individually, each observation is small. Together, they show that these landscapes are still doing critical work.

iNaturalist users in the region have contributed some great photos!

And this iNaturalist project from the region caught our eye!

The Botanical Society of South Africa project is organized by the society
to enable the collection of plant and fungi observations by it's members in South Africa.

In this week’s video, we focus on several of the living systems that keep these landscapes functioning. Systems that support tourism, but also generate additional value that rarely gets counted. None of them announce themselves loudly. All of them weaken quickly once landscapes are simplified or broken apart.

Ecotourism represents visible value.
Ecosystem services represent invisible value.

When we look at them together, a different picture emerges. One where economies are not just benefiting from nature, but quietly relying on it.

We can imagine alternative sources of revenue. We can debate short-term tradeoffs.
What’s much harder to replace are the living systems that make landscapes productive in the first place.

We’d love to hear from you! How should economies account for the value of intact ecosystems and not just the parts we can easily measure? And what do you think is most at risk if that value continues to be overlooked?

Join the conversation in the comments on YouTube and let us know how you see what’s really at stake here.

Thank you for being part of Naturalists’ World,

Scott

*This content uses publicly available data from iNaturalist. iNaturalist does not endorse or sponsor this newsletter.

**Some images in this newsletter were shared on iNaturalist under a CC0 (public domain) license. We thank the contributors who generously chose to place their observations and photos in the public domain, helping make global nature education and conservation possible. Individual photographers are not attributed out of respect for personal privacy.