**6. Conservation of medicinal plants**

Conservation of medicinal plants should have an objective of conserving biodiversity within specified place like by preparing botanical garden to confirm that all the plant species will be ready to use by the future generations [59]. Sustainable managing of indigenous medicinal plant diversity is very significant not only for the reason that their potential benefit as lead compound for new drug discoveries but also because of the large percent of people around the world still depends on traditional medicinal plants [60]. There is certain protection activities that have been carried out everywhere in the globe intended to keep endangered medicinal plants from additional harm [61]. This includes in situ and ex situ protection actions. Both in situ and ex situ protection efforts are applied to protect medicinal plant genetic biodiversity. In situ conservation is the protection of plant biodiversity in their natural territories. Certain indigenous medicinal plants have to be well kept in situ because of the difficulty for domestication and managing [62]. Medicinal plants can also be protected by confirming and inspiring their growth in different spaces, as they have been used traditionally [62]. This can be promising in the place of churches, mosques, graveyards, farm margin, river bank, and so on. An interpretation that has been made by the researcher showed that medicinal plant diversity grown around the religious sites is prohibited from collecting [60]. The second one is ex-situ conservations means conservation outside their natural habitats. This comprises gen bank, herbal gardens, and others. As it was stated, home gardens have an abundant influence for the protection of medicinal plant species in broad, and at the same time the biodiversity can also be well kept; thus, home gardens are strategic and best agricultural systems for the protection, production, and development of species that are medicinally important [62, 63]. Various efforts have been made to safeguard and encourage sustainable use of plants that are medicinally important in different country. In the field, biodiversity protection goes alongside with the protection of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological information. Ethnobotanical investigation can point out managing difficulties of biodiversity through interviews and market studies; moreover, it provides resolutions by encouraging indigenous knowledge

and customs that had protection advantages [64, 65]. A study reported that the wise utilization of species that are medicinally useful wants the participation of diverse sectors and larger community support and for this, awareness formation is suggested [66].

### **7. Conclusion**

Ethnobotany is a life science which studies the interaction between human beings and flora in particular and broadly deals with the investigations, observations, and identifications of botanical diversity used for the prevention and treatment of human and livestock ailments. It also studies about the indigenous people knowledge, beliefs, and practices (i.e. it may be cultural and religious practices) related with medicinal plants. Also, it includes how human beings categorize, isolate, and associate floras beside with joint relationships of floras and human beings. The ethnobotanists should have to discuss with native community to share their routine life and to respect their cultures in order to obtain valuable information about the plants used for the medicinal purpose. Ethnobotany might be considered as a particular subdivision of ethnobiology. Ethnobotanists use different methods and materials for their ethnobotanical studies including ancient writings, surveys, discussions with key informants, and field investigations of the relationship between the plants and human beings. They typically work together with native people or traditional healers who have knowledge about the plants to record the indigenous biodiversity including plants and also for the identification of botanical diversity, parts used for the treatment of human and livestock diseases, and method of preparations and applications.

Ethnobotanists somewhat frequently categorize themselves more and more as ethnobiologists or ethnoecologists for the reason that these fields bargain more prospects to evaluate the relationship between the people and the whole surroundings in addition to the societies' interaction with the external environment including the effect of global trade on domestic economy and individual life. Since 1992, the interaction of human beings with plants has created a new term known as "applied ethnobotany" which in fact relates to studies and approaches which allow to work together with the indigenous people and traditional practitioners in an actual way, to investigate the knowledge of native people and develop better management structures which shape specific use practices and social dynamics. Applied ethnobotanies also make every effort to fill the gap between indigenous knowledge and modern practice and to recognize the association between indigenous practices and knowledge schemes and procedures, and directions and financial fashions at the nationwide and worldwide level. In recent times, the term ethnoecology has been invented. Martine defines ethnoecology as a discipline which integrates many diverse academic fields. The term ethnoecology is used to incorporate all fields which designate the relationship between indigenous people and the ecosystem, including subdisciplines such as ethnobiology, ethnobotany, ethnoentomology, and ethnozoology. In fact, ethnoecology is the discipline of how individuals comprehend the interaction between human beings and the living things including animals, plants, and physical elements of a place.

Human being has been consuming floras meanwhile beforehand documented history. Our most primitive ancestors collected floras for foodstuff, medication, fibers, and construction supplies, momentary on their knowledge through oral customs.

#### *Ethnobotany DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104754*

Farming, the exercise of generating yields and rising livestock, came about autonomously in diverse areas of the universe 10,000–15,000 years ago. Plant knowledge was an unlimited benefit in ancient societies, as it conversed a bigger opportunities of survival. Many ancient researchers took an extreme concern in botany, publishing herbals that enclosed plant information, and in addition also contained botanical importance. By using this baseline, an individual can identify and collect medicinal plants from the traditional healers own garden or from the forest and also can easily understand the method of preparations and applications. The term ethnobotany did not coin out as a discipline during the ancient civilization until earlier modern period. Despite the fact that individuals historically had a nearby relationship with the plants and various intellectuals investigated botany, rare scholars investigated the plant knowledge of an ethnic group till the twentieth century. The following are the rare leading ethnobotanical researchers and texts that aided disperse botanical knowledge all the way through the ages.

Even though many new chemical constituents have been derived and identified from medicinal plants used by the multicultural ethnic group, there are no conventional drugs synthesized from these plants using ethnobotanical knowledge and regulated as pharmaceutical products in the United States in at least in the past 40 years. This may look like astonishing, considering the amount of resources and materials invested during the investigation of ethnobotanical knowledge for the past 40 years. On the other hand, indigenous knowledge about the medicinal plant is still used by the scholars and researchers for the identification of new chemical constituents and structures that can be used as the main points for the development of new chemicals that have biological activity. Nowadays, the jobs for scholars and researchers have become more difficult than the past. They did not focus on finding new cultures, rather they focused on previously invented more than 4000 cultures and knowledge. An essential problem challenged by researchers on medicinal plant is that the study on medicinal plant may not all the time result in perfect separation of mechanisms of action, rather they only show "in-vitro pharmacological activity" or "in-vivo pharmacological activity on different organ" or "identification chemical constituents and suggesting that it may have such activity due to the presence of this functional groups," etc. A close relationship between ethnobotanists who conduct research for the assessment of medicinal plant use practices by the indigenous people and traditional healers and experimental pharmacologists who conduct study on the pharmacological activity of traditional medicinal plants claimed by the traditional healers is very important in order to add values on present health care system by discovering novel drugs from the natural products and plants. On the assumption that there is a necessity for original, cautious, systematic, and cooperative records of the relationship of human beings with plant nature, for joining societal and environmental systems, for sustaining and improving biodiversity, and for recoupling health and wellbeing with traditional and ecological integrity, ethnobotany will be a discipline of significance and prominence in the globe.

*Medicinal Plants*
