Ethnomedicinal Plant Diversity, Harvesting Patterns and Traditional Healthcare Practices in Jaipur District, Rajasthan, India

Abstract

Traditional plant knowledge remains important to primary healthcare and biocultural continuity in rural and tribal communities of Rajasthan. This study re-analysed the ethnomedicinal component of an 18-month floristic and ethnobotanical investigation conducted in Jaipur district during 2020–2022. The original work used repeated seasonal collection tours, purposive and accessibility-based engagement with locally knowledgeable participants, individual and group discussions, participant observation, guided plant walks, botanical collection and herbarium preparation. The dataset comprises 121 medicinal taxa (117 angiosperms and four pteridophytes). Leaves were reported for 63 taxa (52.06%), followed by roots for 36 (29.75%), seeds for 28 (23.14%), whole plants for 27 (22.31%) and fruits for 25 (20.66%). Herbs (45 taxa; 37.19%) and trees (41; 33.88%) dominated the growth-habit spectrum; phanerophytes (51; 42.14%) and therophytes (43; 35.54%) dominated the life-form spectrum. Fresh non-exclusive coding of the archived remedy descriptions identified gastrointestinal uses for 66 taxa, dermatological/oral/wound uses for 64, metabolic/systemic uses for 57 and musculoskeletal/inflammatory uses for 53. Of 225 plant-part use occurrences, 65 (28.9%) involved roots, rhizomes or whole plants and were classified as potentially destructive. These counts describe the breadth of recorded knowledge, not treatment efficacy or informant consensus. Because the archive lacks a complete participant-level matrix and a voucher catalogue with accession numbers, use value, fidelity level and informant consensus factor were not reconstructed, and taxonomic names remain subject to voucher-based revalidation. The study supplies a transparent regional baseline for conservation prioritisation, renewed consent-based fieldwork and pharmacological screening.