Abstract
Indigenous plant use-systems have evolved under, and constantly adapted to human and non-human impacts. In the last decades however, increasing socioeconomic and cultural transformations, including land-use change, outmigration, globalized markets, the introduction of new species, and climate change have led to a decreasing availability of indigenous resources, and are ultimately leading to a reduction of local use-knowledge. Participant observations, discussions, walks-in-the-woods, semi-structured interviews and informal meetings were carried out in 12 villages of far western Nepal between 2011 and 2015 to assess how sociocultural changes have affected the sustenance of indigenous systems and local biodiversity, when compared to studies carried out in the previous decades. Our findings show that there were no statistically significant differences in subject variable means, but differences were relatively important to plant parts-use and plant growth-forms (p = 0.183 and 0.088 respectively). Cissampelos pareira, Acorus calamus, Calotropis gigantea were found to have the greatest relative importance, whereas Ageratina adenophora, Melia azedarach, Carum carvi were most important based on use values. Among them, C. pareira and A. adenophora were introduced. The spatial distribution of species collected for medicine showed that all habitats were important for collection however, habitats close to villages were more favored. The use of non-indigenous and easily available species and more accessible habitats is becoming more prevalent as primary forests become increasingly overexploited, indigenous species become limited, and sociocultural cause of land use change expand. The utilization of indigenous and non-indigenous species and nearby habitats, although possibly affecting the quality of medicinal species, nonetheless reveals the dynamism of indigenous medicines as an adaptive asset mitigating human and non-human environmental changes.
Highlights
Indigenous medicine represents a socioculturally coherent [1], resilient and valuable resource [2] that is sustained locally through the use of indigenous medicinal plants and their associated knowledge and considered as an active constituent of global medical plurality
Indigenous use-systems have evolved after the shock of original contact [18,24], with decreasing availability of indigenous resources, and the introduction of new species [25,26], socioeconomic transformation [7], indigenous knowledge effacement [26], and climate change [27]
We found that the indigenous medicine of far western Nepal is a mosaic constituted by both indigenous and non-indigenous resources
Summary
Indigenous medicine represents a socioculturally coherent [1], resilient and valuable resource [2] that is sustained locally through the use of indigenous medicinal plants and their associated knowledge and considered as an active constituent of global medical plurality. Medicinal plants are an integral part of indigenous medical systems and livelihoods, and have long been collected, consumed, and conserved by indigenous populations, leading to a wealth of accumulated indigenous knowledge [3,4,5]. Reductions in medicinal plants and associated indigenous knowledge can compel local people to integrate more non-indigenous resources in their pharmacopoeia [16,17,18], and to access second-growth habitats [19] in their indigenous use-systems. In order to test this hypothesis we analyzed the collected species and sites and their importance to ethnobotany and indigenous medicine in far western Nepal, and assessed local peoples’ attitude towards the conservation of these resources at the nexus of climate change and sociocultural transformation
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