Research Training Program

Saleem Ali
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts

Robert DeFilipps, Ph.D. and Robert Faden, Ph.D.
Department of Botany

Spring Break Session
5 March 1992 to 20 March 1992

"An academically and socially enriching experience which gives undergraduates a rare appreciation of institutional research endeavors."

Medicinal Plants of the Philippines / Commelinaceae Projects

In the past, the African plant collections at the US National Herbarium have been partially ignored because the staff concentrate their efforts on specimens from the New World tropics. Now an effort is underway to update the naming of these African plants using current floras and monographs. The Commelinaceae part of this project involved selecting several families of plants found mostly in Africa and then locating the African specimen(s) of these families in the herbarium, checking the identification, making corrections where necessary, and filing recent additions into the herbarium. This project also included included locating specimens by particular collectors whose itineraries and collections are being studied.

Work was also done on the Medicinal Flora of Philippines project. The 7100 islands of the Philippines have a rich and varied native flora which has been subjected to severe human population pressures, resulting in much deforestation. The indigenous (and introduced) plants are sought as sources of medicine on a daily basis by local, traditional herbal healers, since most villagers cannot afford treatment by conventional Western medicinal practices. A project to produce a publication on the medicinal plants of the Philippines is currently underway in collaboration with Dr. Leonardo Co, a Filipino herbalist and ethnobotanist. To assist this work, data was gathered through a literature search of the Smithsonian libraries and Biogeography Files. The culmination of this project was the production of a bibliography of articles related to Philippine medicinal plants and a preliminary checklist of medicinal plants.