Ethnobotanical study (with emphasis on medicinal uses) on Eastern Golestan province (Turkmen tribes) plants

Ethnobotany uses the general knowledge of people about the use of plants for different purposes, including home treatment of diseases by plants in different cultures and ethnicities. Golestan is considered as one of the important provinces of Iran for extracting botanical knowledge of natives. The Turkmen is one of the ethnicities of this province that has been able to make good use of nature capacity. The present study was conducted to collect and classify the medicinal plants used by the natives of the Turkmen villages in Eastern Golestan province in 2018. For this purpose, we visited 30 villages and interviewed 90 natives who used medicinal plants to treat people diseases. The results showed that about 54 plant species have a special place in the ethnobotanical knowledge of the region natives studied among which Silybum marianum L. with 78, Urtica dioical L. with 65, and Calendula persica C.A.Mey. with 62 had the highest use report (UR), respectively. S. marianum with 0.86, U. dioical with 0.72, and C. persica with 0.68 showed the highest relative frequency of citation (RFC). The highest number of species belonged to Asteraceae and Lamiaceae families, respectively. The most consumption of medicinal plants was attributed to the gastrointestinal and cardiovascular diseases. The neurological, respiratory, and blood sugar diseases showed the highest amount of informant consensus index frequency (ICF).