An ethnobotany of the Lukomir Highlanders of Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Background: This aim of this study is to report upon traditional knowledge and use of wild medicinal plants by the Highlanders of Lukomir, Bjelašnica, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). The Highlanders are an indigenous community of approximately 60 transhumant pastoralist families who speak Bosnian (Bosanski) and inhabit a highly biodiverse region of Europe. This paper adds to the growing record of traditional use of wild plants within isolated communities in the Balkans.

A method to estimate sediment ingestion by fish.

A method is proposed to use naturally occurring radionuclides of the (238)U decay series as mass balance tracers to estimate sediment ingestion by benthic fish. The mass balance tracer method can take two forms: one that does not account for tracers that would be ingested in invertebrate food items (simple mass balance tracer method) and one that does (adjusted mass balance tracer method). The contents of the gastrointestinal (GI) tracts from 17 Shorthead Redhorse Suckers (Moxostoma macrolepidotum) were analyzed using the proposed method to determine the proportion of sediment in the fish gut.