Format: ORAL

Kimberly P. Castro, Rodrigo Cmara-Leret

Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Understanding the interactions between people and plants is of great relevance for both biodiversity and biocultural conservation efforts. The use of plants has been considerably investigated based on morphological traits, but explaining how people recognize a plants usefulness based on chemistry has been challenging. Here, we explore to what degree the selection and utilization of medicinal plants is influenced by peoples smell perception of plants. We assess this through a literature review of works published over 50 years on smell perception and Indigenous Peoples knowledge of tropical plants. We find that the sense of smell may very well be a nexus between human-plant interactions, but the concept has been relatively complex to establish due to the confines posed by disciplinary perspectives and methodological limitations in most studies. To advance the field, we propose integrating phytochemistry with standard ethnobotanical data collection within study communities to better understand the role of plant scents and smell perception in medicinal plant selection.