Astonishing diversity—the medicinal plant markets of Bogotá, Colombia

From December 2014 to February 2016, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 plant vendors in 24 markets in Bogotá in order to elucidate more details on plant usage and provenance. The markets were chosen to cover as many neighborhoods of Bogotá as possible, thus trying to represent the complete geography of the city and its ethnically diverse population. Plants were always sold in the regular mercados de abasto—the regular food supply markets. Within a neighborhood, we always chose the main market, in order to make data comparable. Semi-structured interviews following [49] are under consideration of the collection standards established by [52]. During the interviews, a complete sample of all plants sold in a respective market stall was bought and all available information for each species elucidated from the vendor. Vendor participants were self-selected: every vendor in the studied markets was asked if they wanted to participate in the study, and the vendors who agreed were then interviewed. Overall about one third of the vendors in the markets participated in the interviews. Interviews were conducted only after explaining the study to all participants and obtaining their oral prior informed consent. No further ethics approval was required. All work was carried out following the International Society for Ethnobiology Code of Ethics [53] and under the framework provided by the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and Fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use of the Convention on Biological Diversity; the interviewed vendors retain the copyright of their traditional knowledge. Any commercial use of any of the information requires prior consensus with the informants involved, and an agreement on the distribution of benefits.

Twenty-six of the participants were women, and 12 men, with ages ranging from 25 to 70 years. The ethnicity of the vendors was not disclosed. All interviews were conducted in Spanish.

Vouchers of all species were collected, and all plant material was identified at the National Herbarium of Colombia. No material whatsoever was exported from Colombia. The nomenclature of all species follows www.​tropicos.​org, under APG III [54].

Among markets we compared plant species reported as being used (unique Latin binomials, e.g., Aloe vera), plant uses (unique combinations of a species used for an ailment or illness, e.g., Aloe vera for eye irritation), and plant categories (unique combinations of a species used for a category of ailments, e.g., Aloe vera sensory system).

To compare the geographic/market structure of plants and plant uses, we extracted lists of unique and shared plants, plant uses, and plant categories in each market [55]. In addition to these raw counts, we also used Euclidian distance as a metric of the difference among markets.

To evaluate plant importance, we used the logarithmic informant consensus (LIC) index of [56]. Here, we considered markets as “occurrences,” so for a species:where for each use of a species ICu = (FCu − NSu)/(FCu − 1), FCu is the total reports of that use and NSu is the number of species reported for the use.

To evaluate the diversity of uses across markets, we calculated, for each plant that occurs in at least two markets, the percent of its uses that are unique to each market.

All analyses were performed using the R program package [57].