Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae DOI: 10.5586/asbp.3616 ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER Publication history Received: 2018-08-13 Accepted: 2018-11-24 Ethnobotanical investigation of wild Published: 2019-04-02 vegetables used among local communities Handling editor Łukasz Łuczaj, Faculty of Biotechnology, University of in northwest Pakistan Rzeszów, Poland Authors’ contributions Khalid Ahmad1*, Caroline S. Weckerle2, Abdul Nazir1 KA designed the project, did 1 the feld work, and compiled Department of Environmental Sciences, COMSATS University Islamabad, Abbottabad Campus, the data; AN identifed the Abbottabad, Pakistan 2 plant species and provided the Institute of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, University of Zurich, Zollikerstrasse 107, 8008 related details; CSW supervised Zürich, Switzerland and fnalized the manuscript * Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] Funding The research was self-fnanced by authors (mainly by Abstract corresponding author). Wild vegetables can contribute to people’s food security and health. In northwest Competing interests Pakistan, almost 40% of the households are classified as food insecure, due to No competing interests have increasing population and natural and man-made catastrophes. Tere is an urgent been declared. need to get an overview of still existing practices of wild vegetable use and to in- corporate such knowledge into agricultural policies. Te present study, therefore, Copyright notice aims to collect and analyze information on the most widely and commonly used © The Author(s) 2019. This is an Open Access article distributed wild vegetables in northwest Pakistan. Semistructured interviews were performed under the terms of the with 126 informants (26–78-year old) from all 24 districts of the Khyber Pakh- Creative Commons Attribution tunkhwa Province.