Quantitative Ethnobotanical Report of Wild Flowers used by Tribes of Wayanad Forest Division, Kerala- India

Abstract

The quantitative ethnobotany deals the computation and importance of the plants and vegetation to people. It helps quantification of qualitative data in the biological and social science. The traditional source of medicinal plants is an important way for daily curative uses in the rural area. A survey was carried out among the tribes of Munnar forest division, Idukki district, Kerala India. The present study identified traditionally using 47 species of ethnomedicinal plants distributed in 41 genera belonging to 29 families to treat various diseases. Moreover, among the plant studied habit wise analyzed they are 12 herbs, 13 shrubs, 12 trees, each one of climbing shrub, twining shrub, prostrate shrub, climber. The status of plants are analyzed and recorded as 26 common, 14 rare, 5 common & Cultivated and 2 sporadic are described under this study. In this communication, the information’s got from the rural inhabitant were compared with the already existing literature. The data were col- lected randomly from tribal and 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.