Overexploitation is the second biggest driver of global plant extinction. Meanwhile, useful plant species are vital to livelihoods across the world, with global conservation efforts increasingly applying the concept of ‘conservation-through-use.’ However, successfully balancing conservation and biodiversity use remains challenging. We reviewed literature on the sustainability of wild-collected plant use across the countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia—a region of global importance for its biological and cultural richness. After applying defined search terms and a two-stage screening process, 68 articles were reviewed. The numbers which reported sustainable, unsustainable, or context-dependent outcomes were relatively even, but national differences emerged. Through narrative synthesis, we identified five key, reoccurring themes: plant biology; land tenure; knowledge, resource, and capacity; economics and market pressures; and institutional structures, policy, and legislation. Our results show the need for flexible, context-specific approaches and the importance of collaboration, with bottom-up management and conservation methods involving local communities and traditional ecological knowledge often proving most effective.

过度开发是全球植物灭绝的第二大推动力。同时，有用的植物物种对于全世界的生计至关重要，全球保护工作越来越多地采用“使用中保护”的概念。然而，成功地平衡保护与生物多样性的使用仍然具有挑战性。我们回顾了哥伦比亚，厄瓜多尔，秘鲁和玻利维亚等国家/地区关于野生植物使用的可持续性的文献，该地区对其生物和文化丰富度具有全球重要性。应用定义的搜索词并经过两个阶段的筛选过程后，对68篇文章进行了审查。报告可持续，不可持续或与环境有关的结果的数字相对均匀，但出现了国家差异。通过叙述性综合，我们确定了五个重复出现的关键主题：植物生物学 土地使用权 知识，资源和能力；经济和市场压力；以及机构结构，政策和立法。我们的结果表明，需要灵活的，针对特定情况的方法以及协作的重要性，其中涉及当地社区和传统生态知识的自下而上的管理和保护方法通常被证明是最有效的。