2. Material and methods
Field work was carried out over two years, from November 2004 to December 2006. The methodology used to elicit information was ethnobotanical interviews with people with a knowledge of traditional medicine. Many villages and towns have been visited and many of their local people have helped in locating of the interviewees and making first contact. Interviews were individual, except in some cases where several people participated at the same time, as happened in an interview carried out in a nursing home. Interviews did not follow a previously-defined strict questionnaire [10]; they consisted of open [62] and semi-structured [63] questions, which allow and encourage the interviewees' spontaneous participation. The languages used with informants was Spanish and, in some cases, Basque. Whenever possible, the conversations were recorded with the consent of the interviewees and more than one interview session was carried out with some participants to confirm the identification of some plants.
88 people from 40 different villages and towns were interviewed, all of them local people without scientific knowledge, born or having lived most of their lives in the region. 55,7% were women, with ages ranging from 31 to 100 years (average: 68). The species were collected with the interviewee in situ and identified in the laboratory using keys for botanical determination and labelled and included in the PAMP Herbarium at the School of Sciences. The bibliography used for taxonomic determination was Flora Iberica [64], and for unpublished families, we have used Flora of the Basque Country [65].
The plants and their uses were subsequently catalogued according to therapeutic application. For this purpose, a set of 12 categories was established (Table 1), based on the catalogue of pharmaceutical specialities [66] and the traditional terms for illness used in the region, which have two origins: one in which there is a natural explanation for illness; and the other, more spiritual or supernatural, in which illness is caused by the evil eye or magic, but may be treated or cured in the same way [67]. Thus, one of the categories includes 'other traditional uses', where this second type of illness is under discussion. Once the information had been processed, the ethnobotanical information collected was also analyzed quantitatively to obtain the following data: most cited species, plants to which most uses were attributed, number of different uses and most reported medicinal uses, parts of plants most frequently mentioned and the most commonly mentioned preparation and application processes. To establish a deeper pharmacological knowledge of the Navarre Pyrenees, the data was also assessed using quantitative analyses:
1) the Portéres' Ethnobotanical Index [44], which consists in the ratio between useful plants and total flora expressed as a percentage, and which has been adapted to medicinal plants in order to obtain a pharmacological ethnobotanical index [45], so that it can be compared to the results obtained by researchers in the eastern Pyrenees region;
2) ethnobotanical diversity assessed through the Shannon-Wiener index, H' = -Σ (pi ln pi), where pi is the proportion of the number of citations for each species relative to the total number of citations [68];
3) equitability E = H'/Hmax (where Hmax = in R, and R = number of medicinal plants); and
4) FIC, informant consensus factor, the ratio between the number of use-reports minus the number of medicinal plants and the number of use reports minus one [45].
Finally, the uses of every plant have been checked against information published by WHO [69], ESCOP [70] and the E Commission of the German Department of Health [71]. The monographs published by these institutions were reviewed for every organ or part of the reported plants, and the percentage was calculated by dividing the number of plants on which monographs have been published (both positive or negative) into the total number of medicinal plants used.
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