ArticlePloS one2017
Availability, diversification and versatility explain human selection of introduced plants in Ecuadorian traditional medicine.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- RevisitingPhytoKeys · 2026Review
- Cultural integration of invasive species.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Effects of socioeconomic and human-modified landscape variables on medicinal species richness at a macroscale: the case of the Caatinga, Brazil.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2025Article
- Ethnobotanical survey and quantitative assessment of medicinal plants in landlocked communities of San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2025Article
- Ethnobotanical Study of Medicinal Shrubs and Herbs Used by Forest-Fringe Communities of Ghana.Scientifica · 2025Article
- The influence of exotic and native plants on illnesses with physical and spiritual causes in the semiarid region of Piauí, Northeast of Brazil.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2024Article
- Review
- Ecological apparency, ethnobotanical importance and perceptions of population status of wild-growing medicinal plants in a reserve of south-central Mexico.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Article
- The resource availability hypothesis (RAH) and cross-cultural patterns: which one explains West African Cochlospermum species' uses in Benin?Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Article
- Poorly Investigated Ecuadorian Medicinal Plants.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Medicinal plants cultivated in urban home gardens in Heredia, Costa Rica.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Article
- Alien woody plants are more versatile than native, but both share similar therapeutic redundancy in South Africa.PloS one · 2021Article
- Utilitarian redundancy in local medical systems - theoretical and methodological contributions.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
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Abstract
Globally, a majority of people use plants as a primary source of healthcare and introduced plants are increasingly discussed as medicine. Protecting this resource for human health depends upon understanding which plants are used and how use patterns will change over time. The increasing use of introduced plants in local pharmacopoeia has been explained by their greater abundance or accessibility (availability hypothesis), their ability to cure medical conditions that are not treated by native plants (diversification hypothesis), or as a result of the introduced plants' having many different simultaneous roles (versatility hypothesis). In order to describe the role of introduced plants in Ecuador, and to test these three hypotheses, we asked if introduced plants are over-represented in the Ecuadorian pharmacopoeia, and if their use as medicine is best explained by the introduced plants' greater availability, different therapeutic applications, or greater number of use categories. Drawing on 44,585 plant-use entries, and the checklist of >17,000 species found in Ecuador, we used multi-model inference to test if more introduced plants are used as medicines in Ecuador than expected by chance, and examine the support for each of the three hypotheses above. We find nuanced support for all hypotheses. More introduced plants are utilized than would be expected by chance, which can be explained by geographic distribution, their strong association with cultivation, diversification (except with regard to introduced diseases), and therapeutic versatility, but not versatility of use categories. Introduced plants make a disproportionately high contribution to plant medicine in Ecuador. The strong association of cultivation with introduced medicinal plant use highlights the importance of the maintenance of human-mediated environments such as homegardens and agroforests for the provisioning of healthcare services.
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