Background: Ethnobotanical studies in metropolitan areas and urban ethnic markets have grown considerably in recent years as large cities have demonstrated to be significantly rich in biocultural diversity and in driving its evolution, as human populations migrate from one region to another. Urban spaces also represent important places of rich multicultural and multilingual interaction and exchange, where ethnobotany can act as a bridge between research and action. The purpose of this study is to present a case study on how to use ethnobotany in multicultural urban settings by studying people-plant interactions and the larger implications and applications to promote biocultural learning in these areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLandscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs interest in including local communities and their knowledge in biodiversity conservation increases, challenges to do so become clear. One of them is to harmonize local and academic assessments of conservation status. Here, we document the culturally valuable flora of two Amazigh communities in the Moroccan High Atlas Mountains and contrast local conservation observations with IUCN and other red-listing assessments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies suggesting that medicinal plants are not chosen at random are becoming more common. The goal of this work is to shed light on the role of botanical families in ethnobotany, depicting in a molecular phylogenetic frame the relationships between families and medicinal uses of vascular plants in several Catalan-speaking territories. The simple quantitative analyses for ailments categories and the construction of families and disorders matrix were carried out in this study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To conduct a multireader validation study to evaluate the interobserver variability and the diagnostic accuracy for the lung involvement by COVID-19 of COVID-19 Reporting and Data System (CO-RADS) score.
Methods: This retrospective study included consecutive symptomatic patients who underwent chest CT and reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) from March 2020 to May 2020 for suspected COVID-19. Twelve readers with different levels of expertise independently scored each CT using the CO-RADS scheme for detecting pulmonary involvement by COVID-19.
Background: Wild food plants (WFP) have always been consumed by humans, first as the main basis of their food and, since the origins of agriculture, as ingredients of normal diets or as an alternative during situations of scarcity. In contemporary industrialized societies their use is for the most part being abandoned, but they may still play an important role. With the purpose of advancing in the ethnobotanical knowledge of one region of the Catalan Pyrenees, the present study reports the findings of a research project conducted in the Ripollès district (Catalonia, Iberian Peninsula), concerning ethnobotanical knowledge and use of wild and semi-wild vascular plants as foods, along with minor crops.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Ethnobiol Ethnomed
January 2016
Background: Indigenous populations are undergoing rapid ethnobiological, nutritional and socioeconomic transitions while being increasingly integrated into modernizing societies. To better understand the dynamics of these transitions, this article aims to characterize the cultural domain of food plants and analyze its relation with current day diets, and the local perceptions of changes given amongst the Ngäbe people of Southern Conte-Burica, Costa Rica, as production of food plants by its residents is hypothesized to be drastically in recession with an decreased local production in the area and new conservation and development paradigms being implemented.
Methods: Extensive freelisting, interviews and workshops were used to collect the data from 72 participants on their knowledge of food plants, their current dietary practices and their perceptions of change in local foodways, while cultural domain analysis, descriptive statistical analyses and development of fundamental explanatory themes were employed to analyze the data.
Ethnopharmacological Relevance: The skin is the main structure that protects the human body from environmental factors and has, in addition, a relevant relationship to people׳s appearance and beauty. Official medicine and cosmetics have shown interest on elaborating products to protect the dermal system, yet the role of folk medicine is highly unknown in this field. Taking this into account, we performed an ethnobotanical study in a Catalan district of the eastern Pyrenees (northeast Iberian Peninsula), with the purpose of assessing popular plant knowledge and use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The aim of our study was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of acoustic structure quantification (ASQ) ultrasound software in estimating the degree of hepatic fibrosis compared to Fibroscan and liver biopsy.
Materials And Methods: Seventy-seven patients with chronic viral hepatitis B and C underwent standard ultrasound examination, ASQ, Fibroscan and liver biopsy. ASQ analysis was conducted by placing a single region of interest (ROI) on each image captured, and calculating mode, average and standard deviation.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to describe the behavior of histologically proven hepatocellular adenoma (HCA) on low-mechanical index (MI) contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS).
Methods: A review of the databases from 4 academic hospitals revealed 18 patients (15 female and 3 male; mean age, 40 years; range, 25-71 years) with 25 histologically proven HCA lesions who were studied with CEUS at a low MI (0.04-0.