Commercialized "Smudge Sticks" Used as Incense in the Netherlands: An Inventory of Plants and Trends Behind a New Age Fashion.

Incense is essential in religious ceremonies, even in relatively new religious and spiritual movements such as New Age and Neopaganism. These garner little attention from ethnobotanists, although they trigger an international trade in wild-harvested plants. In this paper, we studied the botanical ingredients of smudge sticks (dried plant bundles burned for purification) in the Netherlands, and people's motivations to use them posing the following questions: what plant species are included in smudge sticks? what are they used for? and are exotic plants preferred over native Dutch plant species? We visited online and physical shops in Dutch cities, acquiring a total of 29 different smudge sticks containing at least 15 species.

Maroon Rice Genomic Diversity Reflects 350 Years of Colonial History.

Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana descend from enslaved Africans who escaped the plantations during colonial times. Maroon farmers still cultivate a large diversity of rice, their oldest staple crop. The oral history and written records of Maroons by colonial authorities provide contrasting perspectives on the origins of Maroon rice.

The biogeography of the Amazonian tree flora.

We describe the geographical variation in tree species composition across Amazonian forests and show how environmental conditions are associated with species turnover. Our analyses are based on 2023 forest inventory plots (1 ha) that provide abundance data for a total of 5188 tree species. Within-plot species composition reflected both local environmental conditions (especially soil nutrients and hydrology) and geographical regions.

Nature portrayed in images in Dutch Brazil: Tracing the sources of the plant woodcuts in the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648).

By the mid-seventeenth century, images of natural elements that originated in Dutch Brazil circulated in Europe. These were often included in art collections (the Libri Picturati) and natural history treatises (the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae and the India Utriesque re Naturale et Medica, 1658). The plant woodcut images in these books constituted (icono) type specimens and played a significant role in disseminating scientific botanical knowledge.

Why are plants named after witches and devils in north-western Europe?

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Witches in Western Europe are associated with the use of medicinal, abortifacient, hallucinogenic, and toxic plants. Curiously, these associations are not backed up by first-hand evidence and historians are unconvinced that people convicted as witches were herbalists. Local plant names provide an untapped source for analysing witchcraft-plant relationships.

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities.

Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge.

Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora.

Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness.

More than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden throughout Amazonia.

Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Modeled distribution and abundance of large-scale archaeological sites across Amazonia suggest that between 10,272 and 23,648 sites remain to be discovered and that most will be found in the southwest.

The catalogue of the Westhoff collection of Chinese materia medica (c. 1870): Evidence of interaction between a Chinese medicine practitioner and the Dutch in Indonesia.

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: The Westhoff collection of Chinese materia medica (c. 1870) at the Utrecht University Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands, contains an original, handwritten catalogue, which was putatively ascribed to a Chinese medicine practitioner. It provides a detailed record of the Chinese names, plant parts, preparations, and applications of the specimens contained in glass bottles, which probably reflects the physician's personal interpretation of Chinese medicine in Indonesia at the end of the 19th century.

Unraveling Amazon tree community assembly using Maximum Information Entropy: a quantitative analysis of tropical forest ecology.

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important constraints via predictions using least biased probability distributions. We apply it to over two thousand hectares of Amazonian tree inventories across seven forest types and thirteen functional traits, representing major global axes of plant strategies.

Tracing the introduction history of the tulip that went wild (Tulipa sylvestris) in sixteenth-century Europe.

Tulipa sylvestris, commonly called the "wild tulip", was introduced from the Mediterranean to northern Europe in the sixteenth century and became widely naturalized. Research has focused on tulips that came from the Ottoman Empire, but the introduction path of this native European, early ornamental tulip is unclear, and so is its taxonomic status: three subspecies are provisionally accepted, sometimes treated as species. Here we elucidate the history of introduction of T.

Revisiting traditional Chinese materia medica from European historical collections and perspective for current use.

Background And Aim: Chinese Materia Medica (CMM) is subject to changes over time. Investigating changes in botanical ingredients, applications, plant parts used as well as name changes over time, contribute to the understanding of the history and development of CMM.

Materials And Methods: This study compares four historic collections of CMM, located in Europe, compiled between 1700 and the late 19th century, with a list of contemporary CMM marketed in Europe.

Relationships between species richness and ecosystem services in Amazonian forests strongly influenced by biogeographical strata and forest types.

Despite increasing attention for relationships between species richness and ecosystem services, for tropical forests such relationships are still under discussion. Contradicting relationships have been reported concerning carbon stock, while little is known about relationships concerning timber stock and the abundance of non-timber forest product producing plant species (NTFP abundance). Using 151 1-ha plots, we related tree and arborescent palm species richness to carbon stock, timber stock and NTFP abundance across the Guiana Shield, and using 283 1-ha plots, to carbon stock across all of Amazonia.

Looking beyond history: tracing the dispersal of the Malaysian complex of crops to Africa.

In his 1959 book, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that a Malaysian complex of crops dispersed to Africa in ancient times across the Indian Ocean along the Sabaean Lane. The Malaysian complex comprised bananas, sugarcane, taro, three yam species, rice, Polynesian arrowroot, breadfruit, coconut, areca palm, and betel leaf.

Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what they looked like, and where they came from.

Background: Soon after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the first tomatoes were presented as curiosities to the European elite and drew the attention of sixteenth-century Italian naturalists. Despite of their scientific interest in this New World crop, most Renaissance botanists did not specify where these 'golden apples' or '' came from. The debate on the first European tomatoes and their origin is often hindered by erroneous dating, botanical misidentifications and inaccessible historical sources.

The legacy of traditional rice cultivation by descendants of Indian contract laborers in Suriname.

Background: Some 35,000 indentured laborers from India were recruited to work on plantations in Suriname between 1868 and 1916. It is likely that most were familiar with farming before they were shipped to this former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Around 1900, those who did not return received a piece of land where most of them started growing rice as a staple crop.

Looking into the flora of Dutch Brazil: botanical identifications of seventeenth century plant illustrations in the Libri Picturati.

The Libri Picturati includes a collection of plant illustrations from seventeenth century Dutch Brazil that is kept in the Jagiellonian library in Krakow since World War II. While many studies focused on the artistic details and history of these images, we identified the flora depicted. We used contemporary textual sources (e.

The emperor's herbarium: The German physician Leonhard Rauwolf (1535?-96) and his botanical field studies in the Middle East.

This paper presents the results of the new interdisciplinary research done on Leonhard Rauwolf's herbarium with plants from the Middle East, which was later owned by Emperor Rudolf II. Using various sources, it examines how the herbarium came into the imperial collections, Early Modern methods of botanical research as described by Rauwolf in his printed travelogue, and how the illustrations for the printed book were produced from the specimens in the herbarium. The appendix (available in the online version) presents the new corrected botanical identification of the c.

Alcohol, drugs and sexual abuse in Cameroon's rainforest.

Due to global socio-economical and ecological changes, indigenous societies are exposed to an increased risk of alcohol and substance abuse. Most research on this topic has been done on indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, the US, parts of Europe and New Zealand, leaving indigenous communities in other parts of the world largely unrepresented. This study focuses on alcohol and drug consumption among the Baka: a former hunter-gatherer society in southeastern Cameroon that has been facing drastic socio-ecological changes in the last five decades.

Amazon tree dominance across forest strata.

The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized is urgently required to develop effective conservation strategies. Most Amazonian tree species are extremely rare but a few are common across the region.

The importance of choosing appropriate methods for assessing wild food plant knowledge and use: A case study among the Baka in Cameroon.

In tropical rainforests, access to and availability of natural resources are vital for the dietary diversity and food security of forest-dwelling societies. In the Congo Basin, these are challenged by the increasing exploitation of forests for bushmeat, commercial hardwood, mining, and large-scale agriculture. In this context, a balanced approach is needed between the pressures from forest exploitation, non-timber forest product trade and the livelihood and dietary behavior of rural communities.