Ethnobiology is the science of dynamic relationships of human culture and ethnic groups with living organisms and their environment. Ethnobiology investigates the complex interactions among these subjects. It is further divided into:

• ethnobotany, alternatively its subfield economic botany, which investigates economically interesting plants;
• ethnomycology (studies of fungi and their uses);
• ethnozoology (studies of fauna – domestic and wild species);
• ethnoecology (relationships between organisms and their environment);
• ethnopharmacology (traditional healing practices with use of plants, animals and other natural resources)
• and further ethnoveterinary medicine, ethnotaxonomy, paleoethnobotany etc.

Ethnobotany is the oldest and most known of these scientific disciplines. The father of modern ethnobotany (from the 1950s) is doubtlessly the well-known US scientist Richard Evans Schultes (*1915 – †2001, Figure 1)^,, who devoted his research mainly to medicinal, hallucinogenic and poisonous plants of Amazonia (e.g. the arrow poison curare or ayahuasca). From his followers (and former students) it is worth to mention two important popularisers of this science: Mark Plotkin (*1955)^, and Wade Davis (*1951)^,]. Both of these authors were for many years researching several regions of the Amazon. Among other important persons of contemporary ethnobotanical research in Amazonia we should at least mention (and thus direct your interest to their publications)  Reiner W. Bussmann and James A. Duke.

Figure 1. Dr. Richard Evans Schultes in Amazonia in the 1940s. Source: Botany Libraries, Economic Botany Archives, Harvard University Herbaria, botlib.huh.harvard.edu/libraries.

From originally mostly descriptive discipline, ethnobotany became a more exact science with the widening of use of quantitative methods. One of the hot issues of modern ethnobotany is biopiracy, which is a practice based chiefly on patenting individual components of plants, fungi or animals for economic gain. An example of an ethnobotanical study and its results is the investigation of plants used for preparation of arrow poisons (curare). Thanks to one of these plants (Chondrodendron tomentosum Ruiz & Pav., Menispermaceae) a compound known as tubocurarine was discovered and described. This chemical was in the past widely utilized as anesthetic. Although it is no longer used, a whole group of present-day pharmaceuticals probably would not exist without the discovery of tubocurarine.

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