Eco-informatics, or ecological informatics, is the science of information (Informatics) in Ecology and Environmental science. It integrates environmental and information sciences to define entities and natural processes with language common to both humans and computers. However, this is a rapidly developing area in ecology and there are alternative perspectives on what constitutes eco-informatics.

A few definitions have been circulating, mostly centered on the creation of tools to access and analyze natural system data. However, the scope and aims of eco-informatics are certainly broader than the development of pedestrian metadata standards to be used in documenting datasets. Eco-informatics aims to facilitate environmental research and management by developing ways to access, integrate databases of environmental information, and develop new algorithms enabling different environmental datasets to be combined to test ecological hypotheses.

Eco-informatics characterize the semantics of natural system knowledge. For this reason, much of today's eco-informatics research relates to the branch of computer science known as Knowledge representation, and active eco-informatics projects are developing links to activities such as the Semantic Web.