Valuation of natural medicinal plants collected from forests and rangelands of Urmia city and its environmental effects

Today, indiscriminate collection of medicinal plants from nature is considered a serious problem in Iran. This research reviews the process of plant collection from nature; determine its harmful effects on the forest and rangeland ecosystem and its economic valuation.

Economic value of plants was estimated based on plant seller’s perspective and sales prices in Urmia city. By visiting the stores, interviewing and completing the questionnaire, the results were analyzed by Excel 2016 and SPSS 19. This research was done in the spring and summer of 1401.

The annual value of all the collected plants from the nature of Urmia is 22.285 billion Iranian rials. Rosa canina species with the local name of Itburni has the highest economic value among the studied natural medicinal plants, while Crataegus pontica with the local name of Yemishan has the greatest biomass content. Based on the type of plant organ collected, destructive harvesting includes 56% of the total plant value and 47.5% of the total dry weight of the harvested plant.

The findings indicate that the collecting of medicinal plants is widespread in Urmia. Due to insufficient supervision by the responsible organizations, therefore destructive harvests including root, rhizome, bulb, fruit and whole plant are done. As a result, about 50 percent of harvested species are under threat. Although this annual value (22.285 billion Iranian rials) is not much, it is a good indicator and a warning for natural resource managers and national planners, so that they can plan correctly about the phenomenon of people's invasion of nature.