Ethnobotanical data and herbarium information from Argentina: tools for medicinal plants research.

GIBERTI, G. C.

South American Medicinal Plants as a Potential Source of Bioactive Compounds.

Transworld Research Network, Research Signpost

Lugar: Trivandrum, Kerala; Año: 2007;

ABSTRACT             The well-known global process of biodiversity richness decrease is seen as a continue menace to future pharmacological developments. Extinction of many plant species could occur before our evaluation of their economic potential. On the other hand, world population increase and improvements on life conditions due to better medical care, lead to cultural and technological changes from folk medicines to modern scientific health prevention and disease cure, thus sometimes forgetting ancient practices and traditional knowledge. The latter is a necessary process but always not desirable. Ethnopharmacology seeks the study and preservation of the lore of folk medicines, some of them very ancient, with the aim to rescue their intrinsic empiric values under a strict scientific evaluation process of their presumed effectiveness. Nowadays, first-hand information on traditional medicinal use of plants is becoming more and more rare to find thus, ethnobotanical information from herbarium labels needs to be re-evaluated, as long as the information displayed seems reliable, and plant identification is correct. The potential medicinal richness of a given flora is also linked to its biological identity, plant abundance and soil coverage in the region under study.  Although not as rich as any other South American countries, the flora of Argentina  comprises several phytochemical and pharmacological interesting taxa, and it is reasonably documented in local herbaria. These institutions not only have the information on the morphological and positional data –i.e. their current geographical living places- of a given taxon, but also they keep interesting ethnobotanical information which could remain as first-class ethnopharmacological knowledge for such specimens. A discussion of these facts in Argentina (floristic richness and its presumed pharmacological interests, ethnobotanical lore and their condition mirrored in herbarium collections) is presented in this paper.