Humaira Shaheen
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan
Title: Calculating the cultural significance of wild medicinal plants at Soon Valley, Pakistan
Biography
Biography: Humaira Shaheen
Abstract
Researchers have developed several indices to estimate the significance of plants to humans. The evaluation of the cultural significance (CI) of plants in ethnobotanical studies is an essential quantitative method in various types of investigations, including research on folk uses and naming and classification of plants. An index of cultural significance was applied to data of 129 wild plants from the Soon Valley, and 63 highly useful plants were selected for the CI studies in this research article. In addition to CI, we used other quantitative methods, such as UR (number of use reports), UV (use value index), RFC (relative frequency of citation), RIs (relative importance index), and CV (cultural value index), for enthnobotanical and statistical analysis. The results showed a strong positive correlation between RFC/CI, CI/RIs (0.95) and a weak association between NU and RI at p<0.05 (n=261). The CI index indicated potential practical applications of each plant ranked according to the contribution of each separate application to survival in traditional cultures, together with estimates of intensity and exclusivity of use for each. A CI-based dendrogram clearly depicted closely related species in the same place in the cluster