Ethnobotanical Exploration of Traditional Medicinal Plants Among the Rural Inhabitants of District Muzaffarabad, Kashmir Himalayan Region

Indigenous knowledge provides insights into the therapeutic properties of medicinal plants used in local communities for basic healthcare. This research focuses on documenting the medical knowledge of rural communities that rely on medicinal plants in their traditional healthcare practices in the district of Muzaffarabad, Kashmir Himalayas. A field survey was carried out in 2022 and 2023 to collect data on wild medicinal plants. Informants were selected at random to learn about indigenous medical practices through semi-structured interviews and group discussions with 95 informants. The ethnomedicinal data were quantitatively analyzed using indices of use value (UV) and relative frequency citation (RFC). The study area documented 57 medicinal plants from 34 different families. Polygonaceae was the most dominant family, contributing 14.03% to medicinal plants, followed by Lamiaceae (10.52%) and Rosaceae (7.01%). Among medicinal plants, communities predominantly used herbs (64.91%) and leaves (29.09%) to treat several health problems. Mentha longifolia had the highest reported use value (1.71), and Bergenia ciliata had the highest recorded RFC value (0.72). Rural inhabitants continue to rely on wild medicinal plants as their primary source of medication. The transmission of indigenous knowledge to descendants is steadily declining and is primarily limited to healthcare practitioners and the elderly. These communities have kept important indigenous knowledge, which must be preserved for sustainable resource management and conservation. A more extensive field exploration is required to discover all of the indigenous knowledge in rural areas of Kashmir.