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.

生态系统服务的可持续提供取决于支撑生态系统服务生产的功能特征。具有功能特征的有机体可以组合在一起，从而简化管理问题，并深入了解影响生态系统服务提供的外部驱动因素。生物的功能性状与提供和调节生态系统服务之间的联系已得到很好的建立，但支撑文化生态系统服务所带来的利益的特征却并非如此。为此，我们采访了南非的401个在社会经济上各不相同的本地生态系统使用者，这些使用者是根据便利性抽样和有目的性抽样而选定的，目的是阐明人们对与鸟类物种相关的性状的看法。后来，我们使用聚类分析来检查这些特征是否可以提供一致的文化功能群体类型。我们根据分配给鸟类的分数确定了六个主要的文化功能组：视觉特征；负面的视觉和行为特征；运动和生态特征；场所关联和丰度指标；共同特征 和行为特征。具有有趣运动和生态特征的鸟类的得分高很多，而具有负面视觉或行为特征的鸟类则得分很低。我们还表明，积极感知的文化功能和生态功能之间可能存在协同作用。