Land-Use and Socioeconomic Change, Medicinal Plant Selection and Biodiversity Resilience in Far Western Nepal.

Indigenous plant use-systems have evolved under, and constantly adapted to human and non-human impacts. In the last decades however, increasing socioeconomic and cultural transformations, including land-use change, outmigration, globalized markets, the introduction of new species, and climate change have led to a decreasing availability of indigenous resources, and are ultimately leading to a reduction of local use-knowledge. Participant observations, discussions, walks-in-the-woods, semi-structured interviews and informal meetings were carried out in 12 villages of far western Nepal between 2011 and 2015 to assess how sociocultural changes have affected the sustenance of indigenous systems and local biodiversity, when compared to studies carried out in the previous decades.