Plant Sciences

Pastoralist tribal communities inhabit Thakht-e-Sulaiman hills since centuries. In this remote and geographically isolated area, local people mainly rely on their natural environment for ethnoveterinary care. The area is therefore of special interest for the documentation and analysis of ethnoveterinary plant use and efficacy. Field work was conducted from 2010-2012 and 86 informants were interviewed. First, detailed unstructured interviews and group discussions were done with key informants, and second, successive oral freelisting and semi-structured interviews were performed. The veterinary diseases as described by the informants were categorized according to the symptoms they cause and the organs they affect. Information on the cited plants, informant consensus factor (ICF) and fidelity level (FL) were calculated based on use reports. A total of 22 ethnoveterinary medicinal plant species, belonging to 21 genera and 20 families with 559 use reports were recorded from two different ecological zones. More species were documented from the foothills but total use reports were higher for mountain species. Mainly leaves are used to prepare decoctions which are administered orally. Most use reports concerned skeleto-muscular problems followed by gastrointestinal ailments, but ritual uses and dermatological illnesses got highest ICF. Most often cited species were Pinus gerardina, P. wallichiana and Daphne papyracea while highest FL was obtained for Salix tetrasperma, Berberis calliobotrys and Litsea monopetala. Interestingly, 50% of the species have the same or similar use for humans. According to the local people, the most often mentioned species have high medicinal potential. They show a wide acceptance, broad application, multiple ways of preparation and administration. There is a need to conserve the knowledge of medicinal plant use in the Thakht-e-Sulaiman hills for future generations and to incorporate it into existing livestock health care services.

To cite this paper: Ahmad, K., MA Khan, M. Ahmad, N. Shaheen and A. Nazir, 2010. Taxonomic diversity in epidermal cells of some sub-tropical plant species. Int. J. Agric. Biol., 12: 115–118 ... Taxonomic Diversity in Epidermal Cells of some Sub-tropical

Journal of Medicinal Plants Research Vol. 5(8), pp. 1489-1493, 18 April, 2011 Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/JMPR ISSN 1996-0875 ©2011 Academic Journals ... Phytodiversity and endemic richness in high altitude ... Hamayun Shaheen*, Naseer Ahmad, Naveed ...

African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 8 (6), pp. 1052-1055, 20 March, 2009 Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/AJB ISSN 1684–5315 © 2009 Academic Journals ... Taxonomic diversity of stomata in dicot flora of a ... Khalid Ahmad1, Mir Ajab Khan1, Mushtaq ...

African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 9(49), pp. 8313-8317, 6 December, 2010 Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/AJB ISSN 1684–5315 © 2010 Academic Journals ... Pollen fertility estimation of some sub-tropical flora of ... Khalid Ahmad*, Nighat Shaheen, ...

Indigenous communities of the Thakht-e-Sulamian hills reside in the North-West tribal belt of Pakistan, where disadvantaged socio-economic frames, lack of agricultural land and food insecurity represent crucial problems to their survival. Several studies in diverse areas worldwide have pointed out the importance of wild food plants (WFPs) for assuring food sovereignty and food security, and therefore the current study was aimed at documenting traditional knowledge of WFPs and analyzing how this varies among generations. Ethnobotanical data were collected during 2010-2012. In total of seventy-two informants were interviewed in ten villages via in-depth interviews and group discussions with key informants followed by freelisting. Data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics and novelty was checked by comparing the gathered data with the published literature. A total of fifty-one WFP species belonging to twenty-eight families were documented. Rosaceae was the domin...