Himalayan Tribe’s Medicinal Plant Knowledge Documented Before Climate Change Erases It

High in the western Himalaya, where the Garhwal hills of Uttarakhand rise above the Dehradun district, the Jaunsari people have spent generations treating fever, cough, indigestion, joint pain and skin ailments with remedies gathered from the forests around their villages. A new study published in Plant Biosystems documents that knowledge in systematic detail, and in doing so issues a quiet warning: the plants themselves, and the cultural memory of how to use them, are both under pressure from a changing climate. The research, conducted by Parul Gangwar and M. S. Karuna of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Rohilkhand University, Bareilly, with Gangwar also affiliated to the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun, records thirty-six medicinal plant species used by the community and frames their preservation as a matter of both biodiversity and cultural survival.

The Jaunsari tribe occupies a distinctive place among the communities of the Indian Himalaya. The study describes them as distinct in culture, tradition and language, with a deep and practical attachment to the forest that surrounds their settlements. That attachment is not sentimental but functional: for centuries, the forest has served as the community’s pharmacy, its pharmacopoeia transmitted orally from elders to younger generations. Earlier ethnobotanical work in the region, including surveys of the Jaunsar-Bawar area published in the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge and Indian Forester, had already established the richness of this plant-based medical tradition. The new research builds on that foundation at a moment when the ecological and social conditions that sustained the tradition are shifting rapidly.

The methodological approach was deliberately direct. The researchers conducted a household survey across villages in Dehradun district using a structured questionnaire, gathering information on which plants are used, which plant parts are harvested, and which ailments they are deployed against. Household surveys of this kind are a standard instrument in ethnobotany, but their value depends on timing. Knowledge held by a small number of knowledgeable individuals, and passed on only by word of mouth, can disappear within a single generation if the chain of transmission breaks. The authors report with prior informed consent from all participants, and the study notes that anonymity and confidentiality were maintained throughout, in line with institutional and international ethical guidelines for research involving human participants.

The headline finding is the documentation of thirty-six medicinal plant species in active use for the treatment of fever, cough, indigestion, joint pain and skin ailments. That range of complaints is telling. These are not exotic conditions but the everyday health burdens of rural life, and the fact that a substantial proportion of them are still managed with plant remedies indicates that the traditional system remains a living practice rather than a historical curiosity. Each of the thirty-six species represents a distinct bundle of information: the correct season for collection, the appropriate preparation method, the dosage, and the specific symptom profile it addresses. Losing any one of these species, or the knowledge attached to it, removes a node from a network of practice built up over generations.

One of the study’s most technically interesting results concerns which parts of the plants are used. Leaves emerged as the most frequently harvested plant part, followed by roots and then seeds. This hierarchy matters for conservation in ways that are easy to underestimate. Harvesting leaves, in most cases, is a comparatively low-impact practice: a plant can often survive defoliation and regenerate, whereas the removal of roots frequently kills the individual, and seed collection can compromise the next generation’s recruitment. A tradition that favors leaves over roots is, in effect, a tradition with a built-in sustainability bias. The documentation of this pattern gives conservation planners a concrete starting point: protecting the species whose roots are used requires different interventions, such as cultivation programs, than protecting those whose leaves alone are gathered.

The study situates this documentation within the broader context of climate change, which the authors, citing the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, describe as the greatest challenge facing humanity today. In the Jaunsari context, climatic shifts are reported to be affecting the community in several specific ways: loss of biodiversity, a general decline in traditional ecological practices, and an increasing disconnection of the younger generation from rural life. Each of these pressures interacts with the others. As plant populations shift or decline in response to changing temperature and precipitation patterns, the raw material of the pharmacopoeia becomes scarcer. As young people migrate toward urban employment and formal schooling, the oral transmission chain weakens. The result is a double erosion, ecological and cultural, in which each accelerates the other.

This coupling of ecological and cultural loss is what gives the study its urgency. Ethnobotanists have long argued that indigenous knowledge systems are not merely archives of useful facts but adaptive systems that have co-evolved with local ecosystems. The Jaunsari pharmacopoeia encodes centuries of empirical observation about which plants grow where, when they are most potent, and how they should be prepared. When climate change alters the distribution and phenology of Himalayan flora, the knowledge system must adapt as well, and adaptation requires that the knowledge remain alive in practice. A tradition documented only in a paper archive cannot adjust to a shifting baseline; a tradition maintained by living practitioners can. This is why the authors emphasize documentation as a tool for sustainable preservation rather than as an end in itself.

The Dehradun district setting adds another layer of significance. The region’s flora has been catalogued since at least the 1920s, when Kanjilal and Gupta produced their forest flora of the Chakrata, Dehra Dun and Saharanpur forest divisions, and herbaceous flora surveys followed in subsequent decades. Against this long botanical record, contemporary ethnobotanical surveys can track not only what people know but what remains available to them. The study’s reference list draws on a substantial body of prior regional work, including ethnomedicinal surveys of the Garhwal Himalaya and studies of livelihood adaptation to climate variability in Jaunsar-Bawar, positioning the new data within a research tradition that stretches back decades. The continuity of that record is itself a scientific asset, allowing future researchers to compare present-day plant use with historical baselines.

The authors argue that the findings underscore the importance of climate change mitigation techniques that connect traditional medicinal knowledge systems with contemporary scientific insights, in order to guarantee the sustainable use and preservation of the medicinal flora. In practical terms, this integration can take several forms. Phytochemical analysis can validate and standardize traditional preparations, as has been done for other Himalayan remedies. Cultivation of high-demand species can relieve harvesting pressure on wild populations. Community-based conservation programs can compensate elders for teaching, and young people for learning, the knowledge that formal economic incentives currently undervalue. The study itself did not test these interventions, but its documentation provides the evidentiary basis on which such programs must be designed: you cannot conserve what you have not recorded.

There is also a wider lesson here for how science approaches indigenous knowledge at a moment of global environmental change. The Jaunsari case is local, but the pattern it illustrates is not. Across mountain regions worldwide, communities whose livelihoods depend most directly on ecosystem services are experiencing climate impacts first and hardest, while the knowledge systems they have refined over centuries are simultaneously being lost to cultural change. Studies like this one treat that knowledge as data worth collecting with rigor, using structured questionnaires, informed consent protocols, and quantitative documentation of plant-part usage patterns. The thirty-six species recorded in Dehradun district are, in that sense, more than a list. They are a snapshot of a working system of empirical medicine, taken at the moment when both the plants and the practice face their most serious test in generations. Whether the system adapts or dissolves will depend on decisions about conservation, education and health policy that extend far beyond the villages where the surveys were conducted, but the first step, capturing the knowledge before it fades, has now been taken.

Subject of Research: Documentation of indigenous medicinal plant knowledge of the Jaunsari tribe in Dehradun, India, in the context of climate change

Article Title: Documentation of indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants of Jaunsari’s living in Dehradun, India for sustainable preservation

Article References: Gangwar, P., & Karuna, M. S. (2026). Documentation of indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants of Jaunsari’s living in Dehradun, India for sustainable preservation. Plant Biosystems, 160(4), Article 218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44473-026-00230-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44473-026-00230-5

Keywords: ethnobotany, medicinal plants, Jaunsari tribe, indigenous knowledge, climate change, Himalaya, Dehradun, biodiversity conservation, traditional medicine, Uttarakhand, household survey, sustainable preservation