Abstract

Ahmad Zamir*, Saeed Imran, Arz Muhammad Umrani, Shabir Ahmad Jan, Syed Talha Kamil and Kamal Anwar

The study was carried to document of medicinally important plants with their economic importance to local community and investigation of problems regarding conservation of medicinal plants including poverty, lack of awareness of alternatives, lack of marketing opportunities, educational level, level of treatment, selling, common plants used and reasons for not collecting Neelam valley located on 73-750 N and 32-350 E, 260 kilometer long Neelam river running along with Neelam Valley and situated to the north and north east of Muzaffarabad. The information were gathered from the local people of the area, through questionnaires and interview of local names, parts of plants used ,ailment treated, method of preparation. This paper was also aim to collect indigenous knowledge of local inhabitants about use of medicinal plants. Total 81 medicinal plants were recorded belonging to different families and revealed that these plants are used by for treatments of several routine diseases of wide range of ailments furthermore there is need to find ways to harvest medicinal plants sustainably from the wild. The plant parts most common used for the preparations of remedies were leaves, aerial parts and fruits. It was concluded that lack of awareness is main problem for the conservation of these medicinal plants.