Ethnobotanical assessment of medicinal plants used by Kurumba ethnic group of Nilgiri district, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

The Nilgiri district, Tamil Nadu, India is rich both in terms of ethnology and biodiversity. The indigenous knowledge system (IKS) of the Nilgiri district has a long history and is deeply rooted in the lives of ethnic communities. The knowledge transfer within a community occurs orally from one generation to another. The objective of the present study is to record the ethnobotanical knowledge and quantitatively evaluate the consensus of the IKS associated with the Kurumba ethnic group of the district. Ethnobotanical explorations were carried out from February 2019 to January 2020 in three taluks of the district, which covers all the major Kurumba settlements. The data were collected using semi-structured questionnaires and face to face interviews with 77 informants. 88 medicinal plant species belong to 47 families and 78 genera were documented. The most dominant families in the study are Lamiaceae (8 species), Solanaceae (7 species), Asteraceae (5 species), Euphorbiaceae and Rutaceae (4 species each). Therapeutic usage of plant taxa were recorded, which was further substantiated by specimen collection and taxonomic identifications. The quantitative indices of the data were analyzed using the informant consensus factor (FIC). The plant usage pattern was described by categorizing ailments into 16 groups. The FIC values were highest for ailment categories like cardiovascular, antifertility, venom inflammation, swellings and liver problems (FIC = 1.00). Henceforth, the present study is a pioneering work that establishes a complete regional database of the IKS on medicinal plant taxa used by the community. The data provides scope for carrying out further phytochemical and pharmacological investigations.