Survey and assessment of floral diversity on wild edible plants from Senapati district of Manipur, Northeast India

The floristic composition of the state Manipur falls under the Indo-Malayan type ranges from tropical to sub-tropical and temperate deciduous forests. It has rich floral diversity as well as high degree of endemism including a number of valuable medicinal plants. The Nagas and Kukis are the dominant hill tribal communities living in Senapati district. These two communities possessed rich valuable reservoirs of traditional knowledge on plant uses. A wide range of wild plant species are used by both the communities as vegetable food and edible fruit during the growing seasons. The present investigation recorded 89 different species of edible plants and fruits including 3 different species of edible mushroom belonging to 56 families and 75 genera from the district. Of these 23 species (42.59%) of edible plants and 10 species (28.57%) of edible fruits is a new record which has not been reported earlier from the state. A fairly good number of these plants, about 23 species (25.84%) are also used as medicinal food remedy by the local people in the study areas. Further, assessment of overall local availability status of 22 different selected species of edible plants and fruits showed that 12 species (54.55%) are graded to the category of not so common, follow by common and rare or scanty category with 4 species each. Thus, the study provides new records of the edibility of some wild plants into the state ethnobotanical database, assists in understanding the dependency of local community and the role of wild edible plants in the local economy and also provides preliminary information about the local availability status of some selected plants in the study area and the needs for conservation if any of those species.