Ethnobotanical survey of folk medicinal plants used in tribal villages of Amarkantak region of Central India

The main objective of the present study is to identify and record the medicinal plants used by the indigenous tribal communities living in the Amarkantak region of central India. A semi-structured interview schedule was developed to collect ethnobotanical data of the traditional medicinal plants used by the tribes by interviewing the informants. In this study, a descriptive statistical analysis was applied to describe the data. More than 100 practitioners were interviewed in this research, and a total of 118 plant species from 63 families and 108 genera were identified. The most dominant was the family Fabaceae, comprised of 20.63% of total plant species recorded. The most commonly used parts of the plant were the roots (43.96%), and the decoction was the most commonly employed preparation technique (54.85%). The identified diseases were grouped into 13 separate classes out of the 44 disease conditions based on informants' reports. Therapeutic uses of the collected medicinal plants will provide a basic information that can help scientists to perform more research related to conservation of biodiversity of important plant species and also phytochemical/pharmacological evaluation of these most important species of therapeutic significance will provide potential lead compounds for new drug discovery and development.