Keywords
LIANAS
PARASITES
ECUADOR
SHUAR
How to Cite
Abstract
Among the 670 documented plant species used by the Shuar ofAmazonian Ecuador are 97 non-cultivated, mechanically-dependent taxa: vines, epiphytes, hemi-epiphytes, and parasites. The most common uses ofthese plants are for medicine, animal forage, and food. Twenty-five percent or more of craft, fiber, personal, and poison plants are mechanically-dependent species. The Shuar use six or more species of Araceae, Bignoniaceae, Cucurbitaceae, Ericaceae and Orchidaceae. The 17 useful species of Araceae ar the most provided by any family. Despite their abundance, Bromeliaceae and Orchidaceae are oflimited importance, providing mostly ornamentals and minor medicines. Mechanically-dependent species constitute 15% ofthe plant species used by the Shuar. Analysis ofdata from other studies ofnative Amazonian people in Ecuador show thatepiphytes and lianas comprise 10-22% ofthe species used. Twentyone epiphyte and liana species are reported in two or more studies from this region. Three lianas are among the most important non-food plants for the Shuar and other native people ofnorthwest Amazonia. Lonchocarpus nicou provides a fish poison, Strychnos tomentosa an arrow poison, and Banisteriopsis caapi the principal hallucinogen ofnorthwest Amazonia.
Open Access and Copyright Notice
Selbyana is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work. All of Selbyana's articles and reviews are free to access immediately upon publication. There are no author charges (APCs) prior to publication, and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews for their own scholarly use. To facilitate this, Selbyana depends on the financial backing of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the hard work and dedication of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers and partner institutions.
Authors are free to choose which open license they would like to use for their work. Our default license is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). While Selbyana’s articles can be copied by anyone for noncommercial purposes if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. The author grants Selbyana a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility.
Authors are responsible for and required to ascertain that they are in possession of image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. Contents of the journal will be registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals and similar repositories. Authors are encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or personal websites, including commercial sites such as academia.edu, to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access).