Etnobotânica médica de Vila da Penha, Maracanã, Pará, Brasil.

Abstract

It was intended to trace information about medicai plants used in the community of Vila da Penha, Maracanã, Pará State, in order to contribute to the popular medicine appreciation and supply data for medicai resources conservation. The methodology used involved structured and semi-structured interviews, guided tour, gathering and botanic material identification. Thirty eight informants, chosen by the "snow bali" technique were interviewed. From this sampling universe, only twenty one informants were able to join the guided tour according to their availability. It was calculated the corrected popular use concordance (CPUc) of the medicai species by the informants, as well as identified which plants with highest cultural importance to the studied natives. It was calculated the Shannon index for the environments where diversity index takes place and Use Value Method for each medicai species. A number of 150 species have been identified, distributed into 64 families and 129 genera. Lamiaceae, Asteraceae and Fabaceae were the families with the greatest floristic diversity. Ocimum micranthum Willd., Plectranthus amboinicus (Lour) Spreng, Aloe vera (L.) Burm. F., Mentha pulegium L., Ruta graveolens L. and Carapa guianensis Aubl. were the species that presented the highest values of CPUc. The uses for which the plants were indicated are distributed in 16 categories of diseases, which the most frequent were: problems in the digestive system, infectious and parasitic diseases, problems in the respiratory system, symptoms and badly-defined signs and genito-urinary. Aloe vera (L.) Burm. F., Jatropha gossypiifoliaL. and Himathantus sucuuba (Spruce ex Müll. Arg.) Woodson were the species that had the highest use value. Nine explored environments were describes by natives of the village according to the emic perspective of each informant: yards, secondary forest ('capoeira'), mangrove swamp, beach or 'restinga', roadside, slash or 'roça', flooded forest and savanna ecosystems. The yards are the environments with the highest diversity of medicai species cited. The roadside are the most important environment for the community, because they have the highest use value. At this point, it is claimed that the natives' knowledge about the local medicai flora can supply significant contribution for the conservation of the vegetal diversity and also the local environments explored.