Traditional knowledge 10 min far from Barcelona: ethnobotanical study in the Llobregat river delta (Catalonia, NE Iberian Peninsula), a heavily anthropized agricultural area.

BACKGROUND: The right floodplain at the Llobregat river delta (Catalonia, NE Iberian Peninsula) constitutes an agricultural periurban area adjacent to Barcelona, which has remained ethnobotanically unexplored until now. This area comprises a very heavily anthropized mosaic of soil uses-urban, industrial, natural, agricultural-including the Agricultural Park of Baix Llobregat. The main aim of this work has been to collect and analyze the ethnoflora of this area in order to fill a gap in the ethnobotanical knowledge in industrialized areas. METHODS: The followed methodology has been based on semi-structured interviews. The obtained data have been qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed and compared with other studies. RESULTS: Data have been gathered from 83 informants. The interviewed informants referred 1965 use reports from 292 taxa, including both non-cultivated and cultivated species, from 85 botanical families. Among those, 451 were referred to medicinal uses, 1247 to food uses and 267 to other uses. In the present study, 779 vernacular names have been reported for 287 taxa. In addition to medicinal and food uses, this study significantly enhances our understanding of some agrosilvopastoral uses of plants, artistic use of plants and insights into folk functional foods. In this regard, we propose a novel quantitative ethnobotany index (the folk functional food index) to assess the relative significance of taxa employed as folk functional foods. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study highlight the enduring presence of ethnobotanical knowledge in this periurban agricultural region and underscore the significance of its preservation.

The Power of Wild Plants in Feeding Humanity: A Meta-Analytic Ethnobotanical Approach in the Catalan Linguistic Area.

Wild food plants (WFP) have always been present in our kitchen, although they have not always been given the same importance as crops. In the Catalan linguistic area (CLA), covered in this paper, WFP were of great importance as a subsistence food not only during the years of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) and World War II (1939-1945), but also long before these periods and in the years thereafter. The CLA has been well studied at the level of traditional knowledge on plant biodiversity, and much of this information is collected in a database by the EtnoBioFiC research group. The aim of this work is to carry out a meta-analysis of the WFP dataset of he CLA (only regarding edible uses, drinks excluded) and to identify the most quoted plants, and the information associated with them. With data from 1659 informants, we recorded 10,078 use reports of 291 taxa (278 of which at specific or subspecific levels and 13 only determined at generic level) belonging to 67 families. The most reported taxa, also with highest cultural importance indexes, are Thymus vulgaris, Foeniculum vulgare subsp. piperitum, Laurus nobilis, Rubus ulmifolius and Mentha spicata. The ethnobotanicity index for food plants is 6.62% and the informant consensus factor, also for food uses, is a very high 0.97, supporting the robustness of the information. The results provided and discussed in this work concern a significant part of the edible resources in the territory considered, which is, often and mainly, underestimated and underutilised. Its consideration could be an opportunity to promote closer and more sustainable agriculture. From the state-of-the-art of this question, it is possible to propose old, in some cases forgotten foods that could be newly introduced onto the market, first, but not only, at a local level, which could be interesting for new crop development in the frame of a valorisation of territorial identity.