Theories or secondary hypotheses resulting from ethnobotany research articles found in the first 56 years of the journal Economic Botany.
The volume and page references allow you to see the original articles in Economic Botany.
22:087-102
- Plant remedies are possible contributing factors of disease.
22:149-154
- Awareness of one problem with a plant does not imply awareness of all possible problems.
22:178-190
- Excessively complex technologies used with plants may persist as traditions long after they are necessary.
- Plant populations may be artificially enlarged due to human activities.
22:191-194
- Psychoactive plants are effective in treating disease.
22:289-292
- Forced immigrants (slaves) carry intellectual technologies to new homes and use new materials for old purposes.
23:050-054
- Traditional plant diversity is threatened by commercial diversity (or lack).
24:032-033
- Effects of psychoactive plant consumption may result in consistent types of artistic expression.
24:062-068
- Effects of psychoactive plant consumption may result in consistent types of imagery.
24:069-072
- Labor and time consumption is so high with some plants that it would be a major hindrance in everyday use.
24:180-181
- Plant product use changes due to commercial competition and changes in social habits.
24:182-186
- There is a difference in habituation (addiction) between local and external populations.
24:279-282
- Local people prefer to be treated by European medicine first and use traditional plant medicine when the situation is hopeless.
25:063-104
- Migration and settlement patterns are influenced by plant distributions.
- Plant populations are influenced by human settlement patterns.
25:423-450
- Medicinal plants were being used by Pacific Islanders prior to arrival of Europeans.
26:340-351
- Hallucinogenic plant use in puberty rites of passage may be intended to enhance fertility.
- Transference of this use may have come from an ordeal trial of the past.
- Imagery seen when using psychoactive plants is based upon cultural expectations.
27:175-192
- Availability of synthetic fibers for nets allows over fishing.
- Commercial fishing is now viable because of the increased strength of synthetic fibers.
- Floats of local materials are hard to see, whereas plastic balls are easy to see: the result is people can now find and steal other peoples fish from traps.
27:235-240
- Government conflict over psychoactive plants occurs when a local practice conflicts with external perspectives of what is acceptable, e.g. external governments may try to pressure a government to ban production/use of a psychoactive plant.
- Differentiating between production and export allows local cultural use of otherwise illegal substances
27:343-347
- Plants of Mexican origin are propagated by seeds (per C. Sauer)
- In trying to identify plant origins, it may be more important to examine diets than vocabularies.
28:061-062
- Stabilization of plant dyes may be the result of certain cultural practices and lead to wider use.
- Natural origin and obvious non-toxicity of anthocyanins are powerful subjective attributes in favor of their acceptance as food coloring materials.
28:247-284
- Some local forms of fruit trees may be considered to be superior in size, but the results are inconclusive if people are actively selecting for size.
29:047-068
- Low cost, highly effective psychoactive plants are persistent?
- Does production of accessory paraphernalia lead to better sales or added value for psychoactive plants?
29:164-170
- The legal status of marijuana makes it a marginally desirable business opportunity except that it may offer the possibility of an exciting lifestyle.
29:242-244
- Decomposition of manioc leaves is responsible for the black color on treated gourds.
31:340-357
- Displaced people may be able to develop substitute plants for certain kinds of usages, but medicinal plants may be very difficult to replace and require adopting another medicinal system.
33:298-310
- Retention of archaic methods in the face of modern agricultural techniques is an important self identification pattern.
- Transfer of knowledge from a culture's primary crop to an introduced crop may occur even if the logic of the donor culture's growing techniques are different.
33:320-328
- There is variation in the use of chewing sticks based upon age, gender, and ethnicity.
34:020-026
- People have hastened the selection of an anthropogenically desirable host-parasite combination.
34:068-085
- A taxonomy based upon chemical analyses may reflect other taxonomic criteria important to people who use the plants.
- Perineal agro-ecosystems are more energy efficient and conservation oriented than annuals.
34:181-185
- Even perishable foods such as breadfruit and bananas can be stored for a long time or hidden in the tropics if it is done right.
34:320-333
- Land area dedicated to forests used by a traditional community may be most valuable as a forest and not converted to agriculture because of the myriad of uses.
35:070-088
- Primitive plant cultivars persist in areas where subsistence cultivation persists (e.g., the cultivation system that gave rise to the cultivars.)
36:084-099
- You can only be successful at domestication of a difficult crops such as corn if you have prior experience cultivating vegetative and self pollinating plants that are much easier.
37:080-109
- Lack of domesticated crops may be due to unpredictable environmental conditions and/or a cultural-rational cost-benefit analysis that favors hunting and gathering.
37:120-135
- A subsistence pattern that is maintained in the presence of modern changes is patent evidence of its high survival value.
37:216-227
- Cities have established health centers and rural areas must rely upon traditional medicines
38:065-082
- Some wild species populations show evidence of former domestication activities.
41:148-162
- Floristic composition and cultural technological achievements of a region impart strategic political significance to the region.
41:375-385
- Tree species that are considered sacred are more likely to be sources of edible fruits.
- Wild foods are important in the diet, particularly during seasons when other products are not available.
42:177-194
- Application of generic level folk names positively correlate with saliency and cultural importance.
43:487-497
- A very high percentage of plants reported to be medicinal ARE biologically active.
44:254-266
- There is a high degree of correlation between folk taxonomies of food plants and genetic/biological diversity.
45:166-175
- Diversity in home gardens does not correlate with age where people move often and gardens are young.
- Garden diversity is high in detribalized/market influenced/much acculturated people.
- Home gardens are maintained as convenient places to obtain otherwise available plants.
46:192-211
- Inter-cropping is stratified (and does reflect the structure of adjacent vegetation).
46:305-309
- Across the range of a species, its importance will vary, even among communities with the same cultural origin
47:015-032
- Species of plants are of unequal usage/importance to people.
- Not all plant families are equally important to people.
47:033-043
- Informants of different ages have predictable levels of knowledge that differs in kind.
- Plant usefulness is predictable from plant family, growth-form, density, and several mean parameters.
47:171-183
- Extractive forest products provide local incentives for a resource management strategy that may indeed enhance the protection of biotic and cultural diversity.
47:215-219
- Wealthy people make less use of wild resources.
- Wild plants are a larger share of household income among poor households.
- Yearly opportunity cost will be similar in communities with different incomes.
- Sustainable extraction is a result of the ability to extract, process, and transport, the availability of substitutes and intended use.
- Costs of extraction NTFP increases with increasing species richness.
- Increased commercialization of NTFP leads to depletion which promotes domestication or deforestation.
47:291-296
- Prestige of a plant is important in valuation of a crop.
- Processes involving plants may be more important than the particulars of the plant.
48:090-095
- Consistency of usage of a species (within or between communities) is directly related to efficacy in treatment from either a biological or cultural perspective.
48:382-396
- Development of trade in non-timber forest products does not, by itself, guarantee an increased flow of benefits to local communities.
49:213-222
- Plant based remedies have a pharmacological basis for their reported use.
49:297-308
- Size of sacred groves predicts the survival of rare species (biodiversity).
- Larger sacred groves will more successfully conserve biodiversity.
- New plant species are incorporated into traditional folk medicine.
- Local community knowledge in the use of plant resources is important for conservation efforts.
49:380-386
- Particular species are more important in diets that others.
- Seed germination can be increased.
- Nitrogen or water can increase production of a plant.
- Secondary metabolite levels are proportionate to plant organ age.
50:026-039
- Inclusion without displacement is common when new cultivars are introduced to small farmers.
- The role of maintaining crop diversity is a future but undefined need (packrat model).
50:167-181
- Selective tolerance may represent a form of in-situ domestication for "weedy" species.
50:327-336
- Secondary forests are the most valuable habitat to traditional healers.
50:381-400
- Secondary forests are the most valuable sources of medicinal plants since the plants are mostly disturbance species, cultivars, annuals, exotics, and weeds.
51:020-038
- Diverse uses of a crop and multiple objectives result in genetic diversity and multiple production strategies.
- Traditional agricultural systems are not closed and isolated with the respect to the flow of genetic material.
- Foreign cultivars are added to traditional crop systems rather than displacing traditional cultivars.
- Traditional gardens contain a natural and anthropogenic spectrum of ecological, management, morphological, and use niches and farmers readily fill empty niches with cultivars that are introduced.
51:059-077
- Consumption of woodland materials far exceeds production.
- Diversity of social values increases perceived value of an area of plants.
51:212-237
- If two different groups of people use the same plants medicinally, they must be efficacious.
51:293-306
- Farmer management practices for leafy green vegetables have evolved separately from other kinds of crops.
- Co-evolution due to farmer management allows year around availability of a variety of crops.
51:362-376
- There is an in-habitat aesthetic value to plant species that does not always reflected by market value. This leads to the design of rational forest management.
52:168-182
- Current methodologies are not maximized to optimal foraging strategies.
52:251-259
- People living in uncertain environments develop technologies for storing food resources for later consumption.
52:320-336
- There are gradients of resource exploitation away from sites of human settlements.
53:015-029
- There is a positive relationship between stand density and tree size, soil type, fruit production.
53:041-050
- Plant materials used in sacred activities may be substituted including recently naturalized species.
53:079-088
- Local farmers are more concerned about stable yields than high yields and wide adaptability.
53:144-160
- Garden plants are generally more important than plants collected outside of the community.
- There is a value to newly introduced taxa in a community.
- The value of a plant can be seen from its place in an indigenous classification system.
53:312-326
- Species composition and diversity in home gardens are influenced more by tourism than by cultural background and distance to urban markets.
- Proximity to urban markets may influence species diversity and composition of home gardens in areas where travel is easy and frequent trips to markets are made to buy as well as sell produce.
54:060-072
- Crop productivity potential may influence crop population richness in an area while the availability of infrastructure may affect the crop population evenness.
54:090-102
- Plants introduced to a community as foods, ornamentals, and inadvertently as "weeds" are commonly recruited as local medicinals.
54:295-309
- Cultural erosion (loss of cultural knowledge) parallels loss of genetic diversity (varietal or species).
54:328-343
- Older people know more uses of trees than younger.
- Formal education is not predictive of knowledge level about trees.
- Men tend to know more tree species/uses than women.
54:358-376
- Patterns of resource exploitation will result in quantitative changes in forest composition or even local extinction.
54:377-394
- Traditional Farmers have useful knowledge for crop improvement.
54:513-527
- Indigenous resource rights oppose environmental conservation.
- Strict conservation policies on plant resource usage tend to positively support illegal activities by artificially increasing prices.
- Local utilization patterns are more important for establishing conservation policy than global usefulness.
55:093-105
- Farmers underestimate actual diversity.
- Taxonomic skills of farmers may have important evolutionary consequences for crop development.
55:106-128
- Farmer perceptions of crop selection strategies are at least partially consistent with theories such as crop populations and growing environments.
55:276-289
- Although a sedentary community may recognize many wild edible foods, only a few will constitute significant portions of the diet.
55:555-565
- Indigenous communities are linked to higher levels of biodiversity than are non-indigenous communities in the same location.
- Non-indigenous communities have a higher interest in direct uses of plants whereas indigenous communities have a higher interest in indirect uses of plants.
- Indigenous people value forests for multiple uses, especially indirect ones, whereas nonindigenous communities value forests most as targets of logging.