Medicinal plant diversity in the southern and eastern Gobi Desert region, Mongolia

Urgamal Magsar; Erdenetuya Baasansuren; Munkh-Erdene Tovuudorj; Otgonchuluun Shijirbaatar; Zoltsetseg Chinbaatar; Khureltsetseg Lkhagvadorj and Ohseok Kwon

doi:10.1186/s41610-018-0064-5

pISSN 2287-8327 eISSN 2288-1220

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Published online January 31, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41610-018-0064-5

Journal of Ecology and Environment (2018) 42:04

Medicinal plant diversity in the southern and eastern Gobi Desert region, Mongolia

Urgamal Magsar¹, Erdenetuya Baasansuren², Munkh-Erdene Tovuudorj¹, Otgonchuluun Shijirbaatar², Zoltsetseg Chinbaatar², Khureltsetseg Lkhagvadorj³ and Ohseok Kwon³

Laboratory of Flora and Plant Systematic, Institute of General and Experimental Biology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Department of Biology, School of Natural Sciences, National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; School of Applied Biosciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Republic of Korea

Correspondence to:Ohseok Kwon

Received: November 24, 2017; Accepted: January 17, 2018

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Abstract

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Abstract

Background

The southern and eastern parts of the Gobi Desert area are a unique dry ecosystem with a diverse regional desert, semi-desert, and mountain dry steppe flora. This area habitat is located at the overlap of different floristic regions; on its northeast side, Central Asian desert flora is dominating, and on the eastern side, East Asian flora is observed. The comprehensive survey was carried out to find the floral diversity of the medicinal plants on the region.>

Methods

All recorded species in this study were based on the collected voucher specimens between June and August in the year 2017.>

Results

We recorded 23 families, 57 genera, and 78 species of vascular plants. The families Asteraceae (15 species), Fabaceae (10 species), and Amaranthaceae (10 species) were represented most in the study area, while Caragana (5 species), Salsola (4 species), and Arnebia (3 species) were the most common genera found.>

Conclusion

Conservation status for remarkable species was also reviewed based on the literature. Around the study area, 24 species as “sub-endemic,” 10 species as “very rare,” 4 species as “rare,” 1 species as “alien,” 13 species as “relict,” 10 species as “Red Book,” 2 species as “endangered (EN),” 3 species as “vulnerable (VU),” 3 species as “near threatened (NT),” and 2 species as “least concern (LC)” plants are growing.

Keywords: Medicinal plant diversity, Conservation status, Southern and eastern Gobi Desert, Mongolia