Abstract
The criteria that local people use for selecting medicinal plants have been a recurrent topic in pharmacology and ethnobotany. Two of the current hypotheses regarding this phenomenon, ecological apparency and diversification, attempt to explain the inclusion of “apparent” and “non-apparent” and native and exotic taxa, respectively, in local pharmacopoeia. This study addresses the following questions: Do “apparent” and “non-apparent” medicinal plants have the same importance in local pharmacopoeia? Do “non-apparent” plants occupy more local categories of diseases than “apparent” plants? Do native and exotic medicinal plants have the same importance? Do exotic and native plants occupy different local categories of diseases? This study was conducted with householders of a community from Northeastern Brazil. Out of the 66 plant species cited, most were herbs (39 species), followed by trees and shrubs (27). Herbaceous species also occupied more local categories of diseases (51) than tree and shrub species (28). Furthermore, most of the species cited by the informants were exotic (42). Out of the 94 therapeutic applications cited in this research, 65 were treated with exotic species and 29 with native species, distributed among 13 body systems. These results support both the hypotheses of ecological apparency and diversification.
Highlights
Studies investigating the criteria used by human populations to select plants according to their medical repertoire are recurrent in ethnopharmacology and ethnobotany [1,2,3]
It is not surprising that several hypotheses have been proposed in an attempt to explain the diversity of plant species in pharmacopoeia, among which are the hypothesis of ecological apparency and the hypothesis of diversification
In adding plant species into a pharmacopoeia, the hypothesis of ecological apparency assumes that herbaceous plants usually contain chemical compounds that are more bioactive than those found in shrub or tree species
Summary
Studies investigating the criteria used by human populations to select plants according to their medical repertoire are recurrent in ethnopharmacology and ethnobotany [1,2,3]. The hypothesis of ecological apparency was proposed by Feeny [4] and categorizes plant species into “apparent” (e.g., shrubs and trees) and “non-apparent” (e.g., herbs). In adding plant species into a pharmacopoeia, the hypothesis of ecological apparency assumes that herbaceous plants (non-apparent plants) usually contain chemical compounds that are more bioactive than those found in shrub or tree species (apparent plants). This may explain the greater importance of herbaceous plant species in the pharmacopoeia of various human populations from different Brazilian ecosystems [6, 8, 9]. Only a few studies, which show contrasting results [10, 11], have addressed the apparency hypothesis in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, where the validity of this hypothesis is still intensely debated
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