The IUCN changed its conservation status to Endangered in 2013 as logging, forest fires, and grazing caused its population to dwindle.

[9] Adult trees are highly resistant to large ecological disturbances caused by volcanic activity, after events like these the parakeets play their role by dispersing the seeds far from affected territory.

A study conducted found that cattle ranching by small landowners and larger timber companies within the range of A. araucana severely affects regeneration of seedlings.

Araucaria araucana is a popular garden tree, planted for the unusual effect of its thick, "reptilian" branches with very symmetrical appearance.

[citation needed] Its seeds (Mapudungun: ngulliw, Spanish: piñones) are edible,[11] similar to large pine nuts, and are harvested by indigenous peoples in Argentina and Chile.

[18][19] Pest losses to rodents and feral Sus scrofa limits the yields for human consumption and forage fattening of livestock by A. araucana mast.

[21] Once valued because of its long, straight trunk, its current rarity and vulnerable status mean its wood is now rarely used; it is also sacred to some indigenous Mapuche.

Christopher Nigel Page, a botanist working at Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter planted specimens in disused china clay pits in the St Austell area as part of his research into regreening former extractive minerals sites, which he presented in 2017 in the UK Parliament, with Professor Hylke Glass, also of CSM, as co-author.

The name araucana is derived from the native Araucanians who used the nuts (seeds) of the tree in Chile – a group of Araucanians living in the Andes, the Pehuenches, owe their name to their diet based on the harvesting of the A. araucaria seeds; hence from pewen or its Hispanicized spelling pehuen which means Araucaria and che means people in Mapudungun.

[30] The origin of the popular English language name "monkey puzzle" lies in its early cultivation in Britain in about 1850, when the species was still very rare in gardens and not widely known.

Sir William Molesworth, the owner of a young specimen at Pencarrow garden near Bodmin in Cornwall, was showing it to a group of friends, when one of them – the noted barrister and Benthamist Charles Austin – remarked, "It would puzzle a monkey to climb that".

[citation needed] The recently found 'Wollemi pine', Wollemia, discovered in southeast Australia, is classed in the plant family Araucariaceae.

Their common ancestry dates to a time when Australia, Antarctica, and South America were linked by land – all three continents were once part of the supercontinent known as Gondwana.