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In the past two decades, ethnobiologists have increasingly paid attention to the scouting and documentation of endangered corpora of local food elements and associated traditional knowledge. In this endeavor, food scouting encompasses the methodological tools used for mapping, inventorying, and documenting food and food-related resources. The growing body of research in this field is shedding light on the potentialities of these practices in obtaining baseline data regarding food heritage, which can, in turn, empower local communities in their dynamic understanding and safeguarding of this resource. While food scouting have been gaining an important role in current food and gastronomic ethnobiological research, as well as in other fields of study (e.g., geography and anthropology), little attention has been paid thus far to the methods and approaches underpinning these activities. To partially fill this gap, this contribution aims to tackle some methodological issues connected to the documentation of food and gastronomic elements embedded in local knowledge. Acknowledging the plethora of methods applicable in food scouting research, we describe three specific applications of food scouting to elicit data on local food diversity, highlighting their prospects and limitations. The first case addresses market surveys to obtain baseline data on the local food systems and their associated diversity, the second focuses on context-based freelisting methods for eliciting wild food plant uses, and the third discusses methods for scouting and inventorying artisanal food products. Acknowledging the contributions of Justin Nolan to the advancement of methods in the field of ethnobiology, we suggest that the methodological toolkit of food scouting should include ad hoc transdisciplinary platforms codesigned together with local food actors.

Maya Q’eqchi’ villagers of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala fathom local indicators of climate change keenly. In a small-holder, maize-based, horticultural village, ethnographic interviews with village experts in hunting, agricultural production, and animal husbandry, and with non-expert/lay villagers recounted that many local climate- and subsistence-related activities and some traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) correspond to annual cycles or seasons. This research documents the local queues and timing of residents’ practices as a baseline for monitoring subsequent years’ activities and climate-related observations based on our interpretation of emic views, practices, and traditions. Using focus groups, we collected such traditional indicators to design a visual representation of a seasonal calendar, which we present herein. This seasonal calendar is a locally accessible tool to document monthly climate observations, agricultural and home garden activities, hunting, animal raising, and cultural activities during a complete annual cycle. We supplement observational and focus group data with semi-structured interview data about subsequent changes in weather patterns, which villagers identify as resulting from climate change. We suggest that Maya Q’eqchi’ villagers are active in their acknowledgment of climate change and are taking steps to document its effects on locally significant cultural activities, exemplifying Q’eqchi’ cultural capacity to adapt to ecological changes and to promote local resilience and cultural vitality. We demonstrate how seasonal calendars and the methods to create them may contribute to local and global understandings of TEK and climate change and annotate conventional anthropological methods as considerations for creating seasonal calendars in other cultural and ecological communities.

The identification of plants according to the Linnaean system of taxonomy is a cornerstone of ethnobotany, allowing the discipline to be a comparative science. To accomplish plant identification, ethnobotanists have long relied on the collection of voucher specimens and their deposition in herbaria. Here we critically analyze the role of botanical collecting in ethnobotany and bring attention to a range of issues that can complicate, and sometimes hamper, the practice. In lieu of traditional herbarium specimens, the collection of photographic vouchers and their deposition in digital repositories is proposed as an alternative method for ethnobotanical research. The ever-improving quality and ubiquity of smartphone cameras, photographic citizen science applications like Pl@ntnet and iNaturalist, and deep learning techniques of automated photo identification are discussed as elements that are contributing to a slow revolution in the role of digital data in the field sciences. Guidelines for when plant herbarium specimens versus photographic vouchers should be considered required are laid out. Although botanical collecting will doubtless and with good reason remain a foundational practice in ethnobotany, we present the use of photographic vouchers as a valid, scientifically rigorous and, in some situations, preferred method of identification.

Paleoethnobotany and ethnobotany are closely intertwined. Ethnobotany provides a key interpretive framework for understanding past plant–people interrelationships through the archaeological record, and this understanding of the past provides the foundation for understanding present-day relationships between people and the natural world.

Methods of field work include (among others) frame elicitation, semistructured interviews, questionnaires, short interviews, depth interviews, walks, and visual documentation. These are discussed and evaluated here, with field experiences nuancing practice.

Several ethnobiological studies have used the Jaccard Index, a qualitative, binary measure, to compare group similarities and differences in lists of plant and animal species, medicinals, foods, cultural utilities, and so on. We extend this effort by formulating the Nolan Index, a new, more precise quantitative measure of the relative frequency of listed items to compare similarities and differences between groups . It is deployed here to evaluate the degree of similarity of free-listed, wild plants between novices and experts in rural Missouri.

To explore the process through which people develop knowledge about socioecological change, this article describes a mixed-methods toolkit containing a technique for making maps in real time while moving through landscapes. The quantitative component of the toolkit is grounded in ethnobiologists’ embeddedness in place-based communities and harnesses the power of global positioning systems (GPS). As GPS-wielding ethnobiologists engage in participatory mapping by moving through landscapes with their research collaborators, we can use handheld devices and simultaneously communicate with satellites in outer space to produce maps in real time. Within the existing, large inventory of ethnobiological methods, using handheld GPS devices can be combined with other types of data-collecting techniques to enhance studies of interactions in more-than-human landscapes. Moreover, mapmaking implements movement trace, a tactic for interpreting space-time cultures and documenting grounded experiences with socioecological change. By bringing together interests in the disciplines of ethnobiology and qualitative geographic information systems (GIS), this article describes methods that make it possible to explain the space-time culture that guides people to move through their homelands and to communicate about their experiences even as they work toward integrating and directing the changing circumstances of their lives.

Environmental justice studies (EJS) provides a framework for interdisciplinary research and advocacy in the realm of cultural heritage research and management. Ethnobiologists, in particular those who focus on environmental archaeology, are no strangers to the heritage arena as our scholarship commonly concerns “cultural keystone places,” which are rich with meaning for one or more groups of people. Three dimensions and three core concepts of EJS can serve as guideposts to research centering on these significant places. These EJS concepts align and intersect with core principles of historical ecology (HE), particularly through the study of landscapes as complex systems. This paper highlights how environmental justice and HE can be conceptually integrated. This EJS-HE framework is relevant to research design in environmental archaeology and more broadly ethnobiology, a framing to be adopted at the beginning of the research process that explicitly considers whether a research question is ethical to approach within a particular heritage context.