Integrating humans into biodiversity science through ethnobiodiversity informatics

Biodiversity science is increasingly data-rich and computationally sophisticated, yet humans are still often treated as absent, implicit or overly simplified drivers of ecological and evolutionary change. This limits how well models represent the real-world processes that generate biodiversity and practical impact at a time when human activities are rapidly reshaping biodiversity worldwide. Here, we describe ethnobiodiversity informatics as a necessary expansion of biodiversity informatics - the mobilization, integration and analysis of digital biodiversity data - that represents the human systems shaping biodiversity outcomes, from behavior, trade and governance and migration history to cultural knowledge, infrastructure, ownership and management intensity, as explicit components of biodiversity analysis. Drawing on examples from food systems, human resource provisioning, medicinal plant biogeography, corporate accountability and biodiversity-health linkages, we demonstrate that ethnobiodiversity informatics is already emerging across multiple scholarly domains. We argue that ethnobiodiversity informatics offers three major benefits: more accurate biodiversity models, stronger inference about human processes that most directly shape nature and more informed decision-making. As biodiversity loss intensifies, conservation ambitions expand and large-scale data infrastructures mature, explicitly integrating human systems into biodiversity science has become both necessary and feasible.