Ethnomycological study of wild edible and medicinal mushrooms in district Jammu, J&K (UT), India

Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has a rich tradition of usage of wild edible mushrooms (WEMs) for culinary and medicinal purposes. But very few studies, restricted to some regions of the Union Territory, have been conducted to enlist the WEM. District Jammu has never been explored for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine 2022-03, Vol.18 (1), p.23, Article 23
Main Authors: Sharma, Roshi, Sharma, Yash Pal, Hashmi, Sayed Azhar Jawad, Kumar, Sanjeev, Manhas, Rajesh Kumar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Agaricales
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Botanical research
Dialects
Ethnobotany
Female
Folk medicine
Food
Forests
Fungi
Health aspects
Humans
India
Knowledge
Medicine, Primitive
Middle Aged
Mushrooms
Mushrooms, Edible
New records
Skin diseases
Social aspects
Species
Termitomyces
Traditional knowledge
Variance analysis
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Summary:Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has a rich tradition of usage of wild edible mushrooms (WEMs) for culinary and medicinal purposes. But very few studies, restricted to some regions of the Union Territory, have been conducted to enlist the WEM. District Jammu has never been explored for WEM. Moreover, the quantification of the traditional knowledge of WEM has not been carried out as yet in J&K. Therefore, the present study was conducted in the Jammu district with the aims of enlisting the WEM and its usage, finding the most used WEM, and enumerating the consensus of usage for a species and associated knowledge. A total of 192 informants between the age of 25 and 87 years were interviewed. The collected information was organized and arranged based on use reports for quantitative analysis. The cultural importance index (CI) and factor informant consensus (F ) were calculated to estimate the cultural importance and to test homogeneity of information and knowledge sharing about WEM, respectively. Analysis of variance was used to evaluate the significance of differences in the usage of WEM among different informant categories. Results of the present study show that the locals were having knowledge of fourteen fleshy fungi that are mainly utilized for culinary purposes. They also stated various medicinal values of some of these fungi. Agaricaceae and Lyophyllaceae were the most used families, and Termitomyces (5 species) was the most represented genus. Based on CI values, Termitomyces sp. (CI 0.57) was the most important and diversely used species. Termitomyces heimii, Termitomyces clypeatus, and Termitomyces striatus var. annulatus were the other culturally important and frequently consumed species by the locals. More than 78.6% of these WEM were new records as culinary and medicinal for J&K (UT). The values of factor informant consensus (F ) varied between 0.98 (culinary) and 0.76 (skin diseases). Females, elders, and informants who have not attended schools were having significantly (P 
ISSN:1746-4269
1746-4269
DOI:10.1186/s13002-022-00521-z