Land-Use and Socioeconomic Change, Medicinal Plant Selection and Biodiversity Resilience in Far Western Nepal
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167812
Abstract
Indigenous
plant use-systems have evolved under, and constantly adapted to human
and non-human impacts. In the last decades however, increasing
socioeconomic and cultural transformations, including land-use change,
outmigration, globalized markets, the introduction of new species, and
climate change have led to a decreasing availability of indigenous
resources, and are ultimately leading to a reduction of local
use-knowledge. Participant observations, discussions, walks-in-the-woods,
semi-structured interviews and informal meetings were carried out in 12
villages of far western Nepal between 2011 and 2015 to assess how
sociocultural changes have affected the sustenance of indigenous systems
and local biodiversity, when compared to studies carried out in the
previous decades. Our findings show that there were no statistically
significant differences in subject variable means, but differences were
relatively important to plant parts-use and plant growth-forms (p = 0.183 and 0.088 respectively). Cissampelos pareira, Acorus calamus, Calotropis gigantea were found to have the greatest relative importance, whereas Ageratina adenophora, Melia azedarach, Carum carvi were most important based on use values. Among them, C. pareira and A. adenophora
were introduced. The spatial distribution of species collected for
medicine showed that all habitats were important for collection however,
habitats close to villages were more favored. The use of non-indigenous
and easily available species and more accessible habitats is becoming
more prevalent as primary forests become increasingly overexploited,
indigenous species become limited, and sociocultural cause of land use
change expand. The utilization of indigenous and non-indigenous species
and nearby habitats, although possibly affecting the quality of
medicinal species, nonetheless reveals the dynamism of indigenous
medicines as an adaptive asset mitigating human and non-human
environmental changes.