Use Categories and Local Perception of Decline in Plant Populations: a Case Study of Woody Medicinal Plants in Northeast
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Laboratory of Biocultural Ecology, Conservation and Evolution (LECEB), Campus de Engenharias e Ciências Agrárias, Universidade Federal de Alagoas, BR 104 Norte, Km 85, s/n, Mata do Rolo, Rio Largo, AL 57100-000, Brazil 2 Laboratory of Ecology and Evolution of Social-Ecological Systems (LEA), Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Centro de Biociências, Av. da Engenharia, s/n, Cidade Universitária, Recife, PE 52171-011, Brazil *Corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]
Key Words:
Biocultural conservation, Plant Resource Use, Sustainability, Local ecological knowledge.
Introduction People in developing countries strongly rely on medicinal plants to treat diseases (Hart et al. 2017; Robinson and Zhang 2011). The importance of medicinal plants in these regions, especially in rural areas, is often increased by cultural inheritance and because of difficulties in accessing professional health care facilities (Silva 1997). Therefore, conservation of native medicinal species in these contexts is important in ecological terms and with respect to the provision of basic health care. Several studies have focused on the conservation status of medicinal plant species (Kala 2000, 2005; Pyakurel et al. 2019; Rai et al. 2000; Tali et al. 2018). However, in some ecosystems, useful plants are strongly versatile; a single plant may have several different purposes. Because some uses (e.g., wood uses) have more impact on species decline than others (Ros-Tonen 2000), the isolated association between medicinal plant importance and conservation status may be limited in terms of understanding all factors responsible for conservation challenges in plant populations. Some researchers have tried to overcome this problem by adding supplementary information on
the secondary uses, such as in the calculation of indices for conservation priorities of medicinal plants (Dhar et al. 2000; Dzerefos and Witkowski 2001; Souza et al. 2017) or even by addressing conservation priorities for all useful species, without giving extra importance to the medicinal category (Conde et al. 2017; Crepaldi and Peixoto 2010). However, determining which use categories are more strongly associated with a decline in plant populations still requires extensive evaluation, and local perception has been shown to be increasingly instrumental in ethnobotanical studies as a proxy for species availability and population decline (Gama et al. 2018; Santos et al. 2018). Additionally, little information is available with regard to the joint effect of different use categories on the conservation status of beneficial plants. Consequently, identification of related use categories (i.e., those that employ the same set of species) would be an appropriate initial step for determining this joint effect. The Brazilian Caatinga (seasonally dry, tropical forest) provides an effective scenario to address these issues. It is known for its range of highly versatile species (Albuquerque 2006); however, identifying the uses that account for more significant structural problems of
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