ETHNO-BOTANICAL EVALUATION OF INDIGENOUS FLORA FROM THE COMMUNITIES OF RAJH MEHAL AND GOI UNION COUNCILS OF DISTRICT KOTLI, AZAD JAMMU KASHMIR PAKISTAN

Abstract

The present study reports ethnobotanical information about plants, which were used by indigenous communities of two union councils of district Kotli AJK.The present study is first report of quantitative ethnobotany from study area.Rajh Mehal and Goi are representative union councils of district Kotli, Azad Jammu and Kashmir having large ranges diversity in habitat and climatic conditions.This district is naturally blessed with highly medicinal plants but unfortunately ethno-botanical information is sporadically known.The study area was surveyed for two consecutive years during moon soon period and ethnobotanical data was collected from 112 local inhabitants using a semi-structured, open ended questionnaire and by free listing method.Several quantitative indices including Informant Consensus Factor, Use Value, Frequency of Citation, Relative Frequency of Citation and Relative Importance Index were used to determine relative usage, benefits and coverage of ethno-medicine.The agreement of homogeneity between the present and previous studies and among the indigenous communities was evaluated using the Jaccard Index.The summary statistics and correlation between use value and relative frequency of citation was calculated in SPSS v 16.The data from free listing method was analyzed by using ANTHROPAC package in R software.Comparison of indigenous knowledge among different genders and age groups was made using Spearman correlation test, the result showed that men had higher information (14.05) about plant uses than females (8.55) in the study area.Male informants reported 63.8% (±10.18) of total recorded species and 76% (±4.13) uses while female informants reported 38.8% (±6.06) species and 68% (±3.65) uses.Smith's Salience analysis indicates that most of the plants in the study area were useful against abdominal pain and worms, constipation and pain.Diseases were classified into twelve different disease categories based on International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classification, with Skin and related symptoms (S00-T98) had highest value (0.91) of Informant's Consensus Factor (IC) followed by Circulatory problems (I00-I99) and Diabetes (E10-E14) each having IC value of 0.90.Aerial parts of 21 plant species were utilized in herbal preparations followed by leaves (20 spp.) and oral mode of admiration was most common among inhabitants.Among all the studied species Zanthoxylum alatum was found highly important with a relative importance value of 93.75 followed by Adhatoda zeylanica with an importance value of 91.67.High dependency of local inhabitants on traditional medicines was confirmed by higher values of informant consensus factor, which showed that people in study area still use herbal medicines as a primary source of their health care.The present study indicated that area was rich in medicinal plant knowledge and there is a need to exploit this information for drug development and pharmacological activities in addition of conservation and management of this valuable plant resource of the area.