The 46th Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, May 21–24, 2025

Charred Chenopodium or goosefoot seeds are often among the most ubiquitous taxa at archaeological sites globally, though our knowledge of their use in past societies varies by region. Researchers have long recognized the Andes, Mexico, and Eastern North America as centers of domestication and cultivation, though much remains unknown about genera and species diversity and people-plant interactions. Building on this work, scholars across the western hemisphere have also come to recognize these seeds as more than environmental disturbances to actively explore the ways chenopods functioned within past socio-economies as potentially managed and meaningful plants. The Americas are geographically, culturally, and biologically diverse, and many questions still remain regarding chenopod use and consumption. We welcome case studies or synthetic papers that highlight and reframe the ways chenopods functioned in the past and present, adding to continental and global conversations surrounding this versatile genus.

When plants and animals fundamental to Indigenous communities are no longer readily available by virtue of habitat loss, climate change, and overharvesting, many traditions that have evolved with these species are also threatened. This session will highlight presentations focusing on the conservation and restoration of species used for food, medicine, basketry, and traditions. 

In this roundtable discussion, ethnobiologists demonstrate their broad range of contributions to transdisciplinary explorations of the ways changing interactions between people and their surroundings influence multispecies wellbeing. Roundtable panelists illustrate how they address the conventional concerns of ethnobiology while pushing the envelope with their critical analyses of global health. Panelists aim to capture the real nuances of people’s lives through collaborations with communities who are witnessing, adapting to, mitigating, and otherwise coping with global change. Panelists share how they interpret and explain people’s differential experiences with global change using engaged scholarship combined with empirical research methods framed in robust theories.

This roundtable, hosted by the editors of the Global Change/Global Health book series, showcases the ways engaged scholars can enact change through, among other practices, writing and publishing. Like authors of monographs in the series, panelists in this roundtable at the SoE 2025 conference dive into the health-related causes and consequences of environmental change. We contribute to emerging debates about climate, health, political and social restructurings and comment on global change and global health in relationship to conflicts as well as coalitions. Panelists examine the spatiotemporal depths, heights, and midlands of environmental change where it concerns wellbeing in its full spectrum of meanings.

This session calls for work on ethnozoology, animal health, and ethnoveterinary care in various cultural contexts. Ethnoveterinary care and human-animal relations are critical domains affecting human, animal, and environmental health. This session encourages researchers to present work that surpasses ethnobotanical inventories of veterinary plant use, and expand on topics that include the influence of culture on veterinary care practices; emic understandings of biology, disease, and animal bodies; similarities, differences, or overlap between human ethnomedicine and ethnoveterinary care; multispecies ethnography; and the different ways in which people around the globe perceive, treat, and interact with animal sickness. We further encourage a special focus on how culture interconnects animals, humans, their environments, and global intraspecies wellbeing.

Books are the culmination of years of research and writing and their authors deserve to be celebrated and learned from! We invite recent authors from across the ethnobiology spectrum to join us to share a little about the goals of your work and the process of crafting a book project. Monographs, edited volumes, original research, collections, cookbooks, and related creative works are welcome!

In this session attendees will have the opportunity to learn about recently published volumes and hear from authors directly about the processes involved and how the end product was achieved. This is a great way to learn about the latest works, find that new reading for an upcoming class, or find mentorship for your own book-in-the-making!

This session explores how various examples of Indigenous land stewardship throughout North America provides a powerful example through which to de-center human exceptionalism in resource management and environmental governance. Unlike western ecology, Indigenous concepts of biodiversity usually acknowledge relationality through kinship and obligations between humans, the sacred world, plants, animals, fungi, and abiotic factors. This concept of biodiversity opens space for the emerging field of plant justice and the acceptance of plants as legal ‘persons. It envisions justice for the land involving an agreement between land and people that is simultaneously ecological and cultural. It recognizes that ecological integrity arises from reciprocal exchanges (what systems ecologists might call negative feedback loops or the biogeochemical give and take among members of an ecosystem) that produce biodiversity and ecological stability. It emphasizes moving forward from a widely held understanding amongst many Indigenous peoples of kinship with an animate and spiritual more than human world that is eloquently articulated in distant time stories where humans are surrounded by and interact with intelligences other than that of humans. Following from participatory action methodology this approach suggests that we apprentice to both Indigenous knowledge holders and the plants themselves so that through empathy and learning we might better understand the gifts plants have to offer and what legal dignity looks like for humans, plants and ecosystems.