Testing the non-random hypothesis of medicinal plant selection using the woody flora of the Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Selection of medicinal plants for traditional medicines in Nepal

“…A high percentage of flavonoids in Anacardiaceae and terpenoids in Euphorbiaceae [ 9 ] might correlate with their over-utilization in the Nepalese pharmacopeia. Fabaceae was over-utilized in LM and logLM models, while the NB model showed it as underutilized, consistent with the findings of Muleba et al [ 17 ], indicating a potential over-estimation of medicinal values of some taxa of Fabaceae. This implies that other families may outcompete Fabaceae in terms of people’s preferences for medicinal uses.…”

“…In order to define if plants are preferentially selected or avoided it is necessary to have a complete and up to date flora of the area [ 18 ]. The use of plant databases and the associated knowledge of plant uses to formulate and test theories and hypotheses in ethnobotany is not yet a common practice despite the recent calls for more hypothesis-driven ethnobotanical researches [ 17 ]. The paradigm shift toward a more hypothesis- or theory-driven ethnobotany is important to make ethnobotany a stronger scientific discipline with theories and hypotheses that can be used to predict new medicinal plant uses as well as better explain plant–human interactions [ 60 , 61 ].…”

“…The recent publications of Robles et al [ 13 ] and Muleba et al [ 17 ] also employed the NB model that we used in our study. Our study showed similarities to theirs, given that in all studies the relationships between medicinal plants and the total flora were not linear as suggested in Moerman [ 10 ].…”

“…In model 2, we fitted the general linear model to the log + 1-transformed model (LogLM) as done in a study [ 11 ]. Finally, as LM and LogLM reveal poor performance in modeling count data [ 54 ], we fitted generalized linear model with negative binomial (NB model 3) following Robles et al [ 13 ] and Muleba et al [ 17 ].…”

“…To test the idea that traditional medical systems are influenced in part by therapeutic efficacy, Moerman [ 3 ] linearly regressed the number of medicinal plant species per family against the total number of species per family. Despite debated [ 8 , 13 ], this method has been frequently used and tested in several geographic contexts, e.g., in Amazonian Ecuador [ 8 , 13 ], in Belize [ 14 ], in Kashmir, India [ 15 ], in Hawai’i, USA [ 11 ], in Pakistan [ 16 ], in Mexico [ 4 ], in South Africa [ 9 , 17 ] and in Italy [ 18 ]. Nonetheless, such hypothesis-driven ethnobotanical studies are scant particularly in plant-rich countries with broad traditional medicinal knowledge like Nepal [ 6 , 19 – 23 ].…”