Abstract
BackgroundTraditional medicine has an important role in local communities, who use plants in the treatment of various diseases. The research of traditional uses of medicinal plants allows us to document and analyze ethnopharmacological practices. This paper reports on an ethnobotanical survey that was conducted in the Protected Landscape of the “Serra de Montejunto”, a Portuguese area in the west of the Iberian Peninsula, where these studies were nonexistent.MethodsThe information was obtained through semi-structured ethnobotanical interviews with 78 informants, who were selected from several zones from the study area to have a representative of the entire landscape, during 2014. Local medicinal uses of plants were identified and grouped into 10 categories through data analysis, in quantitative indices such as the relative frequency citation (RFC), the cultural importance index (CI), and the informant consensus factor (FIC). These were used to evaluate the importance of medicinal plants to the locals.ResultsIn the fieldwork, we found 105 taxa used as medicinal plants which belong to 46 families, where Rosaceae, Asteraceae, Fabaceae, and Lamiaceae are the ones with more diversity. The plants were grouped into 10 categories, where the digestive category is the most cited, with 54 taxa, and the ophthalmological category is the less cited, with only one taxon. Leaves and aerial parts are the components most used. Infusion is the most reported form of preparation, along with the oral administration. Most plants referred in this study are still in use today; only 17 are no longer used at the present time because habits have changed. A catalog of medicinal plants was also drawn up.ConclusionThis work enabled us to explore once more our experiences and memories as well as the ancestral use of plants with the goal of expanding ethnopharmacological knowledge. The absence of ethnobotanical studies in this region led us to gather information about useful plants and their applications and benefits. This research helps in the conservation effort of the collective knowledge of medicinal plants for future generations. However, a detailed analysis by body system is still required.
Highlights
Traditional medicine has an important role in local communities, who use plants in the treatment of various diseases
The most represented families coincide with those of other ethnobotanical studies in the Mediterranean area with this same methodology [41,42,43, 47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54]. These families predominate in local folk medicine, probably because they are widely represented in the local flora [47]
The high FIC values found in most of the medicinal categories reflect a high level of homogeneity in consensus among the users and indicate that natural remedies are still considered extremely effective In Table 4, we have presented some important data for each category, namely the number of taxa, the incidence, the number of use-reports, the FIC, and the medicinal importance
Summary
Traditional medicine has an important role in local communities, who use plants in the treatment of various diseases. The research of traditional uses of medicinal plants allows us to document and analyze ethnopharmacological practices. The scientific discipline dedicated to the relationship between man and the use of plants is called ethnobotany [1]. Harshberger coined the term “ethnobotany” in 1985 to describe studies of “plants used by primitive and aboriginal people” and in his 1896 publication, The purposes of ethno-botany, [2], he suggested “ethnobotany” be a field which elucidates the “cultural position of the tribes who used the plants for food, shelter or clothing,” generally accepted as a Vinagre et al Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2019) 15:30 starting point for this field as an academic discipline [3]. Ethnobotany deals directly with the interrelationship between people and plants, including all forms of perception and appropriation of plant resources [4]
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