How Study Design Influences the Ranking of Medicinal Plant Importance: A Case Study from Ghana, West Africa
2015
Dudney, Katherine | Warren, Sarah | Sills, Erin | Jacka, Jerry
How Study Design Influences the Ranking of Medicinal Plant Importance: A Case Study from Ghana, West Africa. Indices that rank medicinal plants by their cultural importance are valuable tools both for developing conservation priorities and locating effective medicinal compounds. Previous studies have compared different indices, focusing on the formulae used to construct them. The final cultural importance ranking can also be affected by other aspects of the research methods, such as selection of informants and design of the data collection protocol. We assess the influence of these different methodological choices by comparing rankings of medicinal plants developed with ethnobotanical data collected in five rural villages in Ghana in 2006. We compare six indices of importance, five that are commonly used and one newly developed based on responses from different sub-samples of our informants. Overall and within each sub-sample, we find little difference in plant rankings suggested by indices constructed with different formulae. Likewise, we find few differences in rankings based on different aggregations of use values. The more significantly influential methodological choices seem to be whether or not to prompt informants by mentioning specific illnesses, and which informants to interview. Specifically, we confirm the common belief that older respondents list different medicinal plant species than younger generations, and that men and women cite different medicinal species. In sum, our findings suggest that conservation priorities are likely to be relatively robust to the particular index and use categories employed to rank plant importance, but sample selection and elicitation methods may significantly influence results.
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