Representations of Human and More-Than-human Characters: Human-Nature Relationships in Biodiversity Databases Through a Narrative Lens

Over the last years, new media have emerged to share knowledge of and experiences with nature online. Most prominently, participatory digital platforms for observations of flora and fauna. Such platforms are citizen science endeavours, forming databases to be used for science and policy. However, these biodiversity databases are also cultural ventures that tell stories about our human relationships with more-than-humans. In this paper we take a narrative approach to study these relations, employing the narratological term characterization to study how humans and more-than-humans relate to each other in biodiversity databases. This narrative lens provides new insights on how humans and more-than-humans are represented and interact with each other in these databases. By applying this lens to the Dutch observation platform Waarneming.nl and its database of millions of observations, insights emerged around individualization, objectification, and isolation. Human characters are represented as individuals and select or restrict the information that is shared in the database, whereas more-than-human characters are represented as abstracted ‘objects’. Furthermore, more-than- humans are represented in isolation, unrelated to other species in shared images and sounds. This is in contrast with the relational nature of the database in which all observations, more-than-humans, and humans are connected to each other throughout space and time. With an eye to a future where humans and more-than-humans co-exist on more equal foot, we invite biodiversity databases to re-evaluate their representation of humans and more-than-humans by embracing more radical relationality. We propose using more active verbs as ‘encounter’ rather than ‘observation’, providing options to acknowledge both the individual, and make multispecies relationships more visible. By considering such changes, biodiversity databases would do more justice to the affective relations between humans and more-than-humans and advance mutual human-nature relationships.