Hi Dwaipayan Sinha and Priya Dharshana,

Thanks for starting this thread.

I always advise people to begin within a theoretical framework to generate a great research question. Ethnobotany theory and social ecological theory are good places to start. Gaoue et al. (2017) and Albuquerque and Hurrell (2010) offer a good overview of ethnobotany theory. For social ecological theory maybe check out Albuquerque et al. (2019). These papers are also good sources of approaches in ethnobotany and can help in formulating useful research questions.

Albuquerque and Hurrell (2010) Chapter Ethnobotany: one concept and many interpretations

Albuquerque et al. (2019)

Article Social-Ecological Theory of Maximization: Basic Concepts and...

Gaoue et al. (2017)

Article Theories and Major Hypotheses in Ethnobotany

I put together an R package to calculate the most common indices used in quantitative ethnobotany. These basically follow the informant consensus methods from anthropology.

Method Package 'ethnobotanyR' Version 0.1.5

This is a work in progress and the latest version is always on github:

http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/CWWhitney/ethnobotanyR/blob/master/vignettes/ethnobotanyr_vignette.html

Sir..,Kindly refer this article

Hi Dwaipayan Sinha and Priya Dharshana,

Thanks for starting this thread.

I always advise people to begin within a theoretical framework to generate a great research question. Ethnobotany theory and social ecological theory are good places to start. Gaoue et al. (2017) and Albuquerque and Hurrell (2010) offer a good overview of ethnobotany theory. For social ecological theory maybe check out Albuquerque et al. (2019). These papers are also good sources of approaches in ethnobotany and can help in formulating useful research questions.

Albuquerque and Hurrell (2010) Chapter Ethnobotany: one concept and many interpretations

Albuquerque et al. (2019)

Article Social-Ecological Theory of Maximization: Basic Concepts and...

Gaoue et al. (2017)

Article Theories and Major Hypotheses in Ethnobotany

I put together an R package to calculate the most common indices used in quantitative ethnobotany. These basically follow the informant consensus methods from anthropology.

Method Package 'ethnobotanyR' Version 0.1.5

This is a work in progress and the latest version is always on github:

http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/CWWhitney/ethnobotanyR/blob/master/vignettes/ethnobotanyr_vignette.html

You can measure biodiversity using indices such as Shannon or Simpson

About your question, I think you need to figure out what is your hypothesis (purpose). For example, you want to see how important the plant is for the community? or How different the traditional knowledge in two different villages or in different age groups. Each quantification indicator should be used to support your hypothesis.

Sir,

Thank you for your response.

I have performed the study on one area amongst various age groups.

The people of that area use a number of plants for their daily usage ranging from medicinal,food or household. I would've thankful if you kindly guide me what is the best way to project this finding.

Dwaipayan Sinha (1) Age of traditional healers (2) Total experience of traditional healers in a year (3) traditional healers having some special expertise to cure a particular disease (4) most useful part of plant species in study (5) during my field survey I have also noticed, most of the traditional healers using mixture of 2 to 3 plant for preparing drug (according to knowledge of traditional healers, mixture of different plant part is more powerful than any individual plant part), that is also useful for analyzing the data.

U can compair ur ethnabotanical data with previous ethanobatnical data of their local community and find out the novel and its number.....

Dear Irena Mincheva

YOU should see the following web address. It could be applied and useful for your research plan

URL... https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ethnobotanyR

Good luck

Thank you for your vital input

What statistics to apply depends on your research question. It is important that the statistics is scientific sound. Ethnobotanical indices are generally not scientific sound and have no legacy in statistics. The RFC is just a normal % value and there is no need for cumbersome formula that explain what a % value is as this is primary school knowledge and has been used in descriptive statistics ever since. No need to turn this into an index. The ICF/IAR by Trotter and Logan gains robustness the more use-reports have been gathered otherwise it gives quite erratic results. The ethnobotanical indices do not consider the variance of the data, which depends on the sampling amplitude. The primary data shows in a far more accurate way what is important and is what needs to be interpreted instead of indices, which subsume all kind of uses in a non-transparent way into one number. The indiscriminate application of indices calculation is one of the main reasons for article rejection in JEP.

I think prof Marco Leonti is right..also try to discuss some phytochemicals analysis done in the past so that the results obtained may get verified to some extent...regards... Bikarma!