What are the drivers of popularity and versatility of medicinal plants in local medical systems?

Abstract

The cultural importance of medicinal plants has been measured in terms of popularity (number of people who know a plant) and versatility (number of therapeutic indications mentioned for a plant). Previous works have provided evidence about some drivers of medicinal plant importance, such as attributes of availability, efficiency, palatability and taste. The present study tested whether local perception of efficiency, availability (ease of acquisition), palatability (degree of pleasantness), and taste influence the popularity and versatility of medicinal plants in two rural communities of Buíque, Brazil. Free-listing was applied to identify the medicinal plants known/utilized in the communities, while semi-structured interviews were performed to collect more information about the plants. Informants participated in exercises to score the plant-parts that they knew and used. Statistical analysis was performed through multiple linear regressions, with none of the models retaining all variables as explanatory for popularity and versatility. However, availability and efficiency jointly explained versatility in one of the communities, while palatability was inversely related to versatility and popularity in the other. This study demonstrated that the studied individuals select plants differently, which makes exposing the driving forces of such differences a challenge.

Wild plants and the food-medicine continuum—an ethnobotanical survey in Chapada Diamantina (Northeastern Brazil)

“…Regarding the differences in cultural importance among species, research on food plants (in general or focused on specific groups like fruits) has elucidated the relevance of several influential variables, such as taste [10,11], availability in time or space/ease of acquisition [11,12], nutritional value [11,13], easiness to process [13], and associated uses-including medicinal uses [11,12]. Studies on medicinal plants have also indicated the role of their organoleptic properties [14][15][16] and availability [16,17] as well as the importance of their therapeutic efficiency or the presence of certain compounds [16,18,19].…”

“…An alternative approach uses statistical tools (predictive models) to find a possible causal relation between one (or several) explanatory variable(s) and a response variable. In such cases, the response variable is often an indicator of the species' cultural importance (knowledge or use), and the explanatory variables are attributes that can be measured with ecological tools (e.g., availability as measured by the species' relative density, using data from plant inventories) or chemical tools (e.g., therapeutic efficiency as measured by the presence of certain bioactive compounds) or are based on people's perception [11,[16][17][18].…”

Wild Plants and the Food-medicine Continuum – An Ethnobotanical Survey in Chapada Diamantina (Northeastern Brazil)

“…In regard to the differences in importance among species, research on food plants in general has elucidated the relevance of several in uential variables, such as taste [9,10], availability in time or space/ease of acquisition [10,11], nutritional value [10,12], easiness to process [12] and associated usesincluding medicinal uses [10]. Studies on medicinal plants have also indicated the role of their organoleptic properties [13][14][15] and availability [15,16] as well as the importance of their therapeutic e ciency or the presence of certain compounds [15,17,18].…”

“…An alternative approach uses predictive models to nd a possible causal relation between one (or several) explanatory variable(s) and a response variable. In such cases, the response variable is often an indicator of the species' importance (knowledge or use), and the explanatory variables are attributes that can be measured with ecological tools (e.g., availability as measured using data from plant inventories) or chemical tools (e.g., therapeutic e ciency as measured by the presence of certain bioactive compounds) or are based on people's perception [10,[15][16][17]. While this approach neglects the direct opinions of respondents, is has the advantage of capturing drivers that may operate unconsciously or even drivers that are culturally rooted but have environmental or biological meaning (e.g., when people mention that some plants are more important because of tradition, but those plants are those with a higher energy content).…”

“…Species availability has been a strong driver of plant knowledge and use for different purposes, especially woody uses [19], but has been a weak predictor of the importance of plants for medicinal purposes [19] and an even weaker predictor of food uses [20,21]. However, for both medicinal and food purposes, recent studies using the local perception of availability instead of conventional ecological tools have found that availability may not be disregarded in regard to predicting species' relevance for medicinal and food purposes [10,15]. In many cases, people usually attribute greater importance to organoleptic characteristics (particularly taste) than other characteristics when choosing which food plants to consume [7,22,23].…”