ABSTRACT
Jitendra Gaikwad,1 Karen Wilson,2 Jim Kohen,3 Subramanyam Vemulpad,4 Joanne Jamie5 and Shoba Ranganathan6,*
Introduction
Mankind has relied on plants since time immemorial, as a source of food, clothing, fuel, shelter and primary health care. The study of the complex interactions between plants and humans is described as ‘ethnobotany’, a term coined by Harshberger in 1895 (Harshberger 1896). Ethnobotany has evolved as an interdisciplinary area incorporating data from disciplines such as chemistry, anthropology, ecology, environmental sciences, geography,
1Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: jitendra.gaikwad@mq.edu.au 2National Herbarium of NSW, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia. E-mail: karen.wilson@rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au 3Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: jim.kohen@mq.edu.au 4Department of Chiropractic, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: subramanyam.vemulpad@mq.edu.au 5Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: joanne.jamie@mq.edu.au 6Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia and Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore. E-mail: shoba.ranganathan@mq.edu.au *Corresponding author
medicine, economics, linguistics, pharmacology, and indigenous law (Fig. 16.1) (Alcorn 1995). Ethnobotanical studies have resulted in the discovery of important bioactive compounds including the antimalarial artemisinin, from Artemisia annua (sweet sagewort) (WHO 2008) and the anti-inflammatory curcumin, from Curcuma longa (turmeric) (Padma 2005). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 80% of the population in developing countries depend on traditionally used medicinal plants for their primary health care (WHO 2007). Much of the world’s biodiversity is also concentrated in developing countries, with unique taxa and great species diversity (Peterson et al. 2003). Today, indigenous traditional knowledge is on the verge of extinction due to acculturation, loss of biodiversity, demise of the knowledge custodians and apathy of younger generations towards the centuries-old knowledge (Brouwer et al. 2005). To combat diminishing biodiversity and dwindling traditional knowledge, access to and exchange of information is crucial amongst researchers, scientists, policy makers and indigenous populations (Ramirez 2007). To facilitate the exchange of information between these diverse users, significant information management systems are required (O’Neill et al. 2003). Information technology (IT) has dramatically changed the way scientific research is conducted (Buneman 2005), giving rise to multidisciplinary fields such as biodiversity informatics (Bisby 2000, Berendsohn 2007). Biodiversity informatics is a new discipline, integrating species level information from diverse domains using the scientific name of the organism as the linking thread (Sarkar 2007).
