209-220 Pinus
brutia Ten., Pinus halepensis Mill., Pinus nigra Arnold,
Pinus pinea L. and Pinus sylvestris L. forests cover approximately 10.91 million hectares area in
Turkey.
Since
there are a lot of settlements inside or near these wide <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Pinus forest lands, the usages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Pinus species are very common among local people. Within this paper, 130 ethnobotanical and
traditional medicinal studies published up to 2011 which were dealed different
areas of Turkey
are examined and the usages of Pinus
species are compiled from 54 of them. It has 269 records that are to be proof of the wide range of ethnobotanical usages of pines. Due P. halepensis has a narrow distribution,
the records about ethnobotanical usage of it does not exist in the investigated
literature.
Particularly medicinal use of pines is the most prominent way of their utilization. It is
stated in the literature that the uppermost medicinal usage of Pinus
species is for respiratory system diseases. They are also used as food, veterinary medicine, dye, firewood, handycrafts, etc.
P.
brutia and P. nigra have the widest
distribution area in Turkey and ethnobotanical usages of them are
found more than other species according to indexes obtained with Shannon-Wiener
index system.
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