Indigenous livestock husbandry and ethno veterinary practices in Endamohoni District of Tigray Region, Ethiopia

Indigenous knowledge is local knowledge that exists and buildup through experiences of the local community in the day-to-day practice and it is economically inexpensive. Farmers use their indigenous knowledge from time immemorial till today, thus it gives a good solution for their problems. However, this knowledge is not well studied, analyzed and documented to be used as a basis for farming system development. Therefore, this study was conducted with the objectives of identifying and documenting farmers’ indigenous knowledge in livestock husbandry, and ethno veterinary practices in Endamohoni district of southern Tigray. The woreda was purposively selected based on its contrasting agro-ecologies (lowland, midland, and highland) and potential of being the source of traditionally knowledgeable peoples who for generations have been associated with livestock rearing. Six kebeles (two kebeles from each of the three agroecologies) were selected as study sites. A total of 175 households (55 from lowland, 60 each from midland and highland), assumed to have a better indigenous knowledge in livestock production were selected for the study. A structured questionnaire was administered to the selected households to collect data on use of indigenous knowledge on livestock husbandry and ethno veterinary practices. After completing the questionnaires for each division, group discussions have been held and an informal meeting with the key informants for triangulation. Result indicated that 88.3, 76.7 and 92.7 % of the respondents in highland, midland and lowland agroecologies respectively were males. The level of education shows that of all the respondents, 55% in highland, 50% in midland and 72.73% in lowland were illiterate. Sheep and cattle in highlands and midlands and goat and cattle in lowland dominated the livestock populations. Shortage of feed in the study areas was ranked as the first constraints of animal production. Farmers use purchasing of crop residue in the highland and midland, destocking in the midland and movement (urna) in the lowland as mitigation mechanisms. Phenotypic selections of different animal species are employed and also keeping history of pedigree is important instrument in the breeding and selection of animals. Breeding of close related livestock is discouraged in the study sites. Seventeen animal diseases and38 aliments were recorded in the study areas and 65 medicinal plants were accordingly documented to treat those diseases. About 83% of the highland, 75 % of the midland and 92.7% of the lowland farmers acquire ethno veterinary knowledge from their old parents. Of the total medicinal plants, (81 %) were wild. In the preparation of the traditional medicine leaves constitute about 51% and 47 % of the medicine was administered orally. The most common preparation method is by crushing and squeezing (45 %). Farmers are aware of toxicity and provide antioxidants. Farmers used herbals (plants) in dairy utensils cleaning, fumigation, milk processing and preservation. These knowledge and practices of livestock husbandry, animal health and product handling and processing should serve as the basis to develop further interventions to improve livestock productivity in the area. As most of the medicinal plants are grown in wild, it is very important to promote conservation in ex-situ and in-situ. And further biological studies should be conducted on the reported medicinal plant species of the study area so as to utilize them in drug development

Wikipedia Information Flow Analysis Reveals the Scale-Free Architecture of the Semantic Space

In this paper we extract the topology of the semantic space in its encyclopedic acception, measuring the semantic flow between the different entries of the largest modern encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and thus creating a directed complex network of semantic flows. Notably at the percolation threshold the semantic space is characterised by scale-free behaviour at different levels of complexity and this relates the semantic space to a wide range of biological, social and linguistics phenomena. In particular we find that the cluster size distribution, representing the size of different semantic areas, is scale-free. Moreover the topology of the resulting semantic space is scale-free in the connectivity distribution and displays small-world properties. However its statistical properties do not allow a classical interpretation via a generative model based on a simple multiplicative process. After giving a detailed description and interpretation of the topological properties of the semantic space, we introduce a stochastic model of content-based network, based on a copy and mutation algorithm and on the Heaps' law, that is able to capture the main statistical properties of the analysed semantic space, including the Zipf's law for the word frequency distribution

Cluster size distribution of the semantic space.

<p>Cluster size distribution of the semantic network at the percolation threshold. In the inset we show the cumulative distribution .</p

The stochastic model representing the semantic space.

<p>Results for the simulation of the stochastic model representing the semantic space. This is a simulation of a <i>toy-model</i> for an encyclopedia of pages with size log-normally distributed, with first moment and second moment . The parameter of the model are , and . In the top panels the out-degree distribution (left panel) and the in-degree distribution (right panel) of the semantic network at the percolation threshold are shown. The corresponding cumulative distributions are displayed in the insets. In the bottom left panel we show the cluster size distribution at the percolation threshold, the relative cumulative distribution is displayed in the inset. In the right bottom panel we show the frequency-rank distribution for the words in the model.</p

A portion of the minimum spanning tree of the semantic space.

<p>A portion of the undirected minimum spanning tree of the network representing the semantic space in the neighbourhood of the entry <i>nature</i> until its third neighbour. The nodes represent different Wikipedia entries, while the edges represent a semantic flow between the different entries. The color partition is based on the nodes modularity classes. Figure realised with the opensource software Gephi <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0017333#pone.0017333-Bastian1" target="_blank">[24]</a>.</p