Legitimate Medicinal Plant Use In the Sierra de Manantlan Biosphere Reserve

The Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve is a 140,000 ha protected natural area inhabited by subsistence agriculturalists located on the border ofJalisco and Colima, Mexico.  Inhabitants use local  plants for many purposes, specifically medicinal, firewood, construction, tools, forage, among others. The objective of the present study is to identify legitimate medicinal use of plants based on informant knowledge of the local flora and the diversity of the local flora Manantlán, Mexico.  We anticipate legitimacy can be identified through corroboration of the informants’ knowledge of plant use. First we identify medicinal plant families as those whose medicinal species richness is disproportionate to their floristic species richness.  Second, we document shared agreement among informants about medicinal plants used to treat a variety of symptoms. Consensus among informant responses indicate legitimized use of the plant family, genus or species for medicinal uses. We quantify informant reports of use for all medicinal taxa and based on predicted species medicinal use relative to species number per family identify families with higher than expected utility applying a body system treatment prescription for comparison.  The results indicate the top five most utilized plant families in Manantlan are the Compositae, Solanaceae, Leguminosae, Labiate, and Verbenaceae families.