Trees link to ecosystem services? Landscape beauty/cultural & religions values. Northern Thailand

Sacred groves or sacred forest are protected areas of forest because of religious belief and constitute an important aspect of the culture life of various communities throughout the world. Sacred forests can be found in many hill-tribe areas in northern Thailand. The Karen and Lawa communities still have sacred or spirit forests. Spirit forest or worship forest is used for religion purpose as the place to celebrate the god of forest, god of mountain, whom Karen and Lawa people believe that will bring luck to the community. Many ecosystem services provided by forests are important for livelihoods of indigenous people. Sacred forests are used for traditional practices by ethnic minority communities in northern Thailand and they protect these forests that are important for their culture and daily life. Forest fallow fields are a dominant feature of agricultural farming landscapes in the study region. Thus, we evaluated and compared the importance of forest fallow fields and sacred forests as sources of medicinal plants for Karen and Lawa ethnic minority communities in northern Thailand. We registered a total of 365 species in 244 genera and 82 families. Of these 72(19%) species in 60(24%) genera and 32(39%) families had medicinal uses. Although the sacred forest housed more species overall than forest fallow fields, about equal numbers of medicinal plants were derived from the forest and the fallows. Thus, a higher proportion (Karen 48%; Lawa 34%) of the species in the relatively species-poor forest fallows were used for medicinal purposes than the proportion of medicinal plants from the sacred forest (Karen 17%; Lawa 22%). Of the 32 medicinal plant families, Euphorbiaceae and Lauraceae had the most medicinal species in Karen and Lawa villages, respectively. Sacred forests are important for providing medicinal plant species to Karen and Lawa communities in northern Thailand, but swidden forest fallows around the villages are equally important in terms of absolute numbers of medicinal plant species, and more important if counted as proportion of the total number of species in a habitat. These points to the importance of secondary vegetation as provider of medicinal plants around rural villages, as seen elsewhere in the tropics.

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