Medicinal plants used for various health issues by rural inhabitant of Wayanad forest division-Kerala, India - A statistical analysis

Abstract

Native peoples of Wayanad use a wide range of plants medicinally. Many of these Plants have profound meaning to their users. Quantitative ethnobotany deals with the computation and importance of plants and vegetation to people. It helps quantification of qualitative data in biological and social sciences. 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 Wayanad forest division, Wayanad district, Kerala India. The present study identified traditionally using 64 species of ethnomedicinal plants distributed in 61 genera belonging to 42 families to treat various diseases. Moreover, among the plant habit wise analyzed there are 16 herbs, 9 shrubs, 10 Climbing shrubs, 25 trees, 3 Small trees and 1 Twiner. The status of plants was analyzed and recorded as 44 rare, 14 Common, 3 extinct, each one in Endangered, Least common and sporadic in this study area. In this communication, the information got from the rural inhabitants was compared with the already existing literature. The data were collected randomly from tribal and healers of 149 informants and 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.Top of Form