Cultural Keystone Species: A dataset of occurrences in English-language literature

We conducted a systematic literature review of the term "cultural keystone species" in English-language peer-reviewed publications indexed in Google Scholar. The initial search, conducted in January 2023 and covering documents up to December 2022, identified 175 publications reporting 699 CKS. Two subsequent updates were performed using the same protocol: one in early 2024 (including literature up to December 2023), which added 65 publications and 268 CKS, and another in early 2025 (up to December 2024), which added 68 publications and 203 CKS. In total, the three rounds of review resulted in 308 publications containing 1,170 CKS reports. CKS are represented as a species–sociocultural group binome. From each paper that used the term "cultural keystone species", we extracted information on the species considered culturally keystone and the sociocultural group that considered it culturally keystone. When the group was not explicitly stated, we inferred it from the context (e.g., using geographical location as a proxy for the sociocultural group). The dataset includes the article's reference, year of publication, title, journal (if available), and DOI (if available). The dataset describes cultural keystone species by identifying their scientific names, levels of identification, families, classes, and kingdoms, as well as the sociocultural group language and the continent. The scientific names were checked against “Plants of the World Online” in case of plants,” Catalogue of Life” in case of animals, and Index Fungorum in case of fungi. For all articles published by the end of 2023, the Nature's Contributions to People (Diaz et al. 2018) and Stewardship Practices (Mattalia et al. forthcoming) associated with each CKS described in the literature were coded and included in the dataset.