Zeitschrift für Bioanalyse und Biomedizin

Ethnobotanical Documentation of Harike Wildlife Sanctuary (Ramsar Site), Punjab: A Case Study

Abstract

Sameer Gautam* and B.S. Adhikari

The present study deals with the systematic documentation of traditional knowledge on medicinal plants used by local people. The data was collected with the help of a semi-structured questionnaire following the snowball sampling method. People with some knowledge of medicinal plants were targeted for gathering information. A total of 85 species from 79 genera and 51 families were mentioned by informants for the treatment of 40 types of health ailments. For the use of plants as medicine, 110 informants from 6 villages were interviewed. Leaves (25% species) are the most used plant part and decoction (19 species) is the most used method for preparation of the drug, while the most frequent administration of the drug is oral (85% species) in the present study. The ethnobotanical indices like use value, relative importance and Fidelity Level (FL) of each species have been derived from the primary dataset. To confirm the plant availability and identification, various field surveys were conducted along with informants across the habitat types within Harike wildlife sanctuary. Besides the harvest time of different wild plants mentioned by informants and the development of conservation policies for the medicinal plant sector, the database is prepared.