Our study has focused on the Garrigues sensu lato, also including nine municipalities that had previously been located in the Garrigues district but currently belong to Segrià district and are known as historical Garrigues. The studied area, belonging to an arid region, is the Garrigues district (in Catalan ‘comarca’), located in west Catalonia, NE Iberian Peninsula (Fig. ), including the Iberian Peninsula, although to date, none has yet been performed in Catalonia. Ethnobotanical studies have also been carried out in arid and semiarid areas all around the world (e.g. Concerning useful plants, the classical approach for arid lands has been the study of economic plants that could be grown or exploited in these areas for landscape protection and, mostly, agricultural and livestock raising activities (e.g. , and the references contained in these papers. Some examples of botanical studies focused on flora and vegetation, carried out in areas close to the Garrigues district, may be found at Masclans, Boldú, Recasens and Conesa, Recasens et al. Īlthough the arid zones have not attracted the interest of researchers as much as mountain or tropical areas, since, a priori, they are considered less rich and diverse compared to the zones with more exuberant vegetation, the arid Iberian lands have been studied in depth from the botanical point of view by the pioneering work of Bolòs and Braun-Blanquet and Bolòs. These territories, roughly coincidental with the Sicoric physiographic territory, are the only semiarid or arid lands in Catalonia, where some elements of steppe flora are present. The soil is generally calcareous and, not rarely, saline or gypseous. This area has a continental Mediterranean climate, with high thermic contrasts between warm and cold periods, and significantly dry, with almost five arid or perarid months per year. Apart from a few areas in the Pyrenees and the Ebro delta and its neighbouring territories, Catalan ethnobotanical prospection presents a significant gap in the Western plains. Also profusely investigated is the coast and the two mountain ranges (littoral and prelittoral) that stretch along the coastline, from the area just north of Cap de Creus to Terres de l’Ebre in the south, basically constituting the Catalanidic territory from the physiographic point of view, and plateaus and basins of central Catalonia, in the Auso-Segarric physiographic territory. Mountainous regions have been extensively sampled from the beginning of the practice of this science in our country, drawing an almost complete ethnobotanical map of the Catalan part of the Pyrenean mountain range. One hundred twenty-four years after ethnobotany’s first definition, Catalonia finds itself among the well-studied territories at the level of traditional knowledge on plant biodiversity. Apart from plants belonging to the typical Catalan, Iberian or European ethnofloras, the present work contributes information on some plants from semiarid or arid regions, such as Artemisia herba-alba and Plantago albicans, much rarer in the ethnobotany of the quoted areas. The informant consensus factor (F IC) obtained for our interviewees is 0.93, and the ethnobotanicity index is 23.47% for the studied area. In the present study, 849 vernacular names with 116 phonetic variants have been collected, as well, for 410 taxa. This study has inventoried, apart from individual plant uses, 260 plant mixtures, of which 98 are medicinal and 162 food. The interviewed informants referred 4715 use reports (UR) of 346 useful taxa, 1741 (36.93) of them corresponding to medicinal uses, 1705 (36.16%) to food uses, and 1269 (26.91%) to other uses. The number of taxa reported in this study was 420, belonging to 99 botanical families. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.ĭata were gathered from 68 interviews involving 101 informants, whose ages range from 24 to 94, the mean being 73.07. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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