Economic Botany section of CBL is now actively engaged in countrywide ethnobotanical studies with a view to document ethnic knowledge and folklores from traditional oral disseminations before their extinction and to publicize information on unexplored or less explored plant wealth for searching new or less known uses of plants or new sources of food, medicine, etc. from inaccessible tribal belts.

Ethnobotanical studies and surveys are being conducted in regular intervals in the major tribal inhabited states of the country namely, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and so on.