Collection, Identification, Evaluation and storing seed of medicinal plants in the Fars province.

The Fars province with more than 13 million hectares area is located the south west of Iran. This large extent of the land has led to a much diversity of climatic conditions that, in turn, have resulted in much more diversity of the plant species. Unfortunately, the recent habitat studies show that many of these valuable plant species are nearly being extincted due to server degradation of the local natural resources. One of the important methods of conservation of the plant germplasms is collection and keeping the seeds in a favorable condition. In order to preserve the germplasm of the plants, the seeds were collected from their natural habitats. The necessary information including vegetative form, seed bearing time, plant community characteristics, and topographic characteristics and including localities, altitude, longitude latitude, aspect and degree of the slope, depth and permeability of the soil were recorded. Having transferred the collected seeds to the Natural Resources Gene Bank, they were sifted, disinfected and purified. Soil properties including salinity, depth, infiltration rate time, acidity and color were determined. Metrological data including climatical conditions, means of annual precipitation and temperature were recorded. All of these records were given to a data bank. By using the data bank and the Fars GIS layers, distribution of the species were detected. In this research, more than 375 accessions were collected from different parts of the province. They belonged to 50 genera of 16 plant's families, Asteraceae with 42 and Lamiaceae with 163 accession had the frequencies. Salvia Genus with 83 had the highest accession and the Teucrium , Ziziphora and Plantago Genera with 27,25,21 accession were in the lower levels, respectively. Peganum harmala, Vitex psedo-negond, Caparis spinosa, Daphne mucronata, Salvia eremophila, Salvia macrosipho, Teucrium polium species with 15, 15, 17, 17, 18, 25, 27 respectively, had the highest frequencies. More than 47.3 percent of these species grow in 1500-2000 meters above the sea level. among all of townships of the province, Shiraz Township has the highest species richness.