The value that local communities ascribe to ecosystems is fundamentally emergent from the cultural bonds to their lands and associated natural elements. Human–wildlife relationships (HWR) in the multicultural Global South are often deep-rooted, owing to a long history of people and their neighbouring species sharing and co-constructing spaces and lives. This diversifies our current definitions of cultural ecosystem services (CES), and we argue that the use of interdisciplinary tools that unpack the complexities of HWR can provide necessary, often-overlooked insights into CES. In this chapter, we draw inspiration from five nature-culture study sites in India – wherein the authors have used interdisciplinary methods to study animal behaviour, social aspects of HWR, cognitive ethology and history – to recommend comprehensive methods to study CES, modelled on the human–nature-culture zones seen across India.
