Conserving Rare and Endangered Medicinal Plants through Networking Database

Abstract

The demand for medicinal and aromatic plants has grown rapidly across the globe in recent years primarily due to the threats posed by increasing demand and resultant extensive destruction of plant rich habitats. In this context many medicinal plants are facing extinction or severe genetic loss. Therefore the collection, conservation and exchange of strategic Information and planting material of medicinal plants have become extremely critical. From ancient times to till date all cultures have used plants as a source of medicine because of their vital role in supplying nutrients as well as strengthening various essential human systems to protect them from several diseases. At present, there is a dearth of awareness about the importance of plant conservation and the methods that are used to conserve the rare and endangered species. Successful conservation requires cooperation between Plant Biologists, research institutions, policy makers and the public. A complex web of different organizations and practices should work together to maintain and safeguard the rare and endangered flora. Well-developed Plant Data Base (PDB) provides an easy way to efficiently store information about medicinal plants and also greatly facilitates shared access to relevant information. The websites help to connect organized information of plants with their images including their variants captured over time. Search tools allow us to find plants by family, genus, scientific name, common name and accession number as well as general categories including flower, fruit, or foliage. The communication strategy for engendering local community support for the conservation programme involves the use of a wide range of media that the local communities are familiar with, and which have the power to communicate the messages to the target groups. Thus the Networking database is useful for plant identification, reference and Biodiversity discovery and implementing these new technologies that can vitally improve possibilities of the conservation, collection and dissemination of medicinal knowledge which contribute to the sustainability of our plant wealth.