Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Perspectives on Natural Resources for Human Health: An Integrated Review of Medicinal Plants, Ecosystem Services, and Sustainable Resource Systems for Health and Well-Being

Abstract

Background: Natural resources such as medicinal plants, forests and greenspaces, aquatic and microbially mediated ecosystems, water, soil, and air form the biophysical bases of human health constituting up to 25-40% of modern drugs and being the major means of treating a substantial share of the world's population owing to the unavailability of conventional healthcare. Although the amount of evidence about the association of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and health outcomes grows continuously, literature in this field is extremely scattered between pharmacology, ecology, nutrition, and public health without much interconnection in terms of how specific resources affect health.

Objectives: The purpose of this systematic review is to synthesize multidisciplinary literature about the role of natural resources in health and wellbeing of people, analyze the state of evidence in each type of resources, outline the main knowledge gap, which is the absence of a conceptual framework linking the availability of natural resources, their bioactivity, ecologic mechanisms and sustainability constraints to health outcomes and propose a novel conceptual framework.

Methods: A structured narrative review was conducted following elements of the PRISMA approach to literature identification and screening. Peer-reviewed literature (2020–2026), WHO technical reports, and recognized international assessments were retrieved from PubMed, Scopus-indexed journals, ScienceDirect, Springer, Wiley, MDPI, and Nature Portfolio outlets, using structured search terms across five domains: medicinal plants and bioactive compounds; forests, green/blue space and ecosystem services; marine and microbial natural products; nutrition, gut microbiota, and food biodiversity; and sustainability, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence applications in natural-product discovery. Records were screened for relevance, recency, and methodological transparency; systematic reviews and meta-analyses were prioritized where available.

Results: Evidence is strongest and most consistent for the therapeutic potential of plant- and marine-derived bioactive compounds (polyphenols, alkaloids, terpenoids, marine alkaloids and peptides) in oncology, metabolic disease, and infection, and for the mental-health and cardiovascular benefits of green- and blue-space exposure. Evidence is emerging but less conclusive for gut-microbiome-mediated effects of dietary bioactives and for artificial-intelligence-accelerated natural-product discovery. Cross-cutting limitations include inconsistent standardization and quality control of herbal products, under-investment in clinical validation of traditional therapies, and accelerating biodiversity loss that threatens the future supply of bioactive resources.

Implications and Conclusion: Realizing the health potential of natural resources requires simultaneous attention to scientific validation, regulatory harmonization, biodiversity conservation, and equitable benefit-sharing with the traditional and Indigenous knowledge-holders who first identified many of these resources. The proposed Sustainable Natural Resources for Human Health (SNRHH) framework integrates these dimensions and offers a template for future empirical and policy research. Well-established evidence (e.g., plant-derived oncology drugs, green-space mental-health benefits) is distinguished throughout from emerging evidence (e.g., microbiome-mediated nutrition effects) and from areas requiring further clinical validation (e.g., most traditional herbal formulations).