Prof. Dr. Joan Vallès Xirau

Botany Laboratory, Faculty of Pharmacy & Food Sciences

Universität de Barcelona (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

Short Bio: Joan Vallès is professor of Botany at the Universität de Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), where he is teaching and performing research activities since 1982. He is PhD in Botany (faculty of Pharmacy) and BSc in Catalan linguistics (faculty of Philology), both at the Universität de Barcelona. His major research subjects are ethnobotany and plant systematics and evolution (with cytogenetic approaches), and he is interested as well in botanical terminology (technical words and folk plants names) and in the history of Catalan Botany in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has coauthored 150 articles in indexed journals, 120 articles in other journals, 110 book chapters and 30 books. He is member of the section of Biological Sciences of the Institute d’Estudis Catalans (Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities).

Keynote Topic: Traditional plant knowledge from people to the society. Aims, approaches and achievements of ethnobotany.

From the origins of the humanity, people named, used and managed plants, starting from those closer to their territories, then enlarging to others not so closely reachable, including cultivation, domestication and commerce. Food, medicine and all other areas of human life are concerned by this activity. Through the centuries, an enormous pool of popular knowledge related to the plant biodiversity has been accumulated in any geographical and cultural territory, maintaining old acquisitions and, whenever necessary, updating them with novel ideas. This called traditional botanical (or, more generally, biological or ecological) knowledge is a biocultural quality of our societies, with both originality in each place and a degree of convergence among some of them. It has the added value of concerning at the same time biological and cultural heritages, making it a treasure of nature and culture. This folk use of plant resources remains local in some cases, but has allowed the generalisation and the commercialisation of many very important products for human wellbeing and development. In many rural areas around the World, this knowledge is largely maintained, but, in many industrialised ones, it is highly eroded, often becoming residual, more or less endangered or at least partly disappeared. This is why it is urgent to collect this information in order it is not lost and it can be reintroduced to the society from which it comes, the latter being one of the ethical duties of the researchers in this discipline. The reach of ethnobotanical research is large, from ethnofloristic work to inventory the useful plants of one territory, to meta-analytic investigations of many different aspects or monographic studies on plants groups or on use groups. In the last years, phytochemical and molecular approaches propose to associate ethnobotanical knowledge with chemical data that could confirm plants uses recorded and with phylogenetic information in order to detect hot taxonomic nodes for one or another plant use. In the present lecture, we will present ethnobotany, its state-of-art, with the main approaches to its research, and some of its achievements and its possibilities for the future.