Quantitative Ethnobotany of Medicinal Plants Used by Indigenous Community in the Munnar Forest Division, Kerala, India

Abstract

The quantitative ethnobotany deals with the computation of the importance of the plants and vegetation to people. It helps in quantification of qualitative data in the biological and social science. The various quantitative tools in ethnobotany help in the calculation of plant taxon. Ethnobotanical approach provide data which is agreeable to the hypothesis-testing, subsequent statistical validation and comparative analysis. The traditional source of medicinal plants is an important way for daily curative uses in the rural area throughout Kerala. Moreover, among the plant studied habit wise analyzed they are 12 herbs, 13 shrubs, 12 trees and each one of climbing shrub, twining shrub, prostrate shrub, climber. The status of plants are also analyzed and recorded as 26 are common, 14 are rare, 5 are common & Cultivated and 2 are sporadic are described under this study. In this communication, the informations got from the rural inhabitant were compared with the already existing literature. The medicinal plants used by people are arranged alphabetically followed by Botanical name, Family name, Voucher specimen number, Local name, Unani name, Part used, Mode of preparation and Disease cured are discussed. The data were collected randomly from tribal and traditional healers of 85 informants the data were statistically analyzed by using suitable statistical tools such as Use Value (UV), Informant Consensus Factor (ICF), Fidelity Value (FL) and various ranking methods.