Market ethnobotany at the Strait: trade, traditional knowledge, and sustainability of medicinal and aromatic plants in Northern Morocco

Authors

  • Jaber Maataoui Laboratory of Materials, Natural Substances and Environment (LAMSE), Chemistry Department, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Tangier, University Abdelmalek Essaâdi, Tangier, Morocco;
  • Rainer W. Bussmann Department of Ethnobotany, Institute of Botany, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Department of Botany and Mycology, State Museum of Natural History, Karlsruhe, Germany. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3524-5273
  • Bahia Abdelfattah https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8311-2513
  • Mohamed Khaddor
  • Noureddine Chouaibi

Abstract

Background: Medicinal and aromatic plant (MAP) markets act as sentinels of plant demand, trade structure and perceived resource pressure. Quantitative, voucher-based market ethnobotany remains scarce for northern Morocco, a Strait-of-Gibraltar crossroads linking Mediterranean, Rif-mountain, Atlantic and trans-regional plant-use traditions. This study documents the MAP trade of the Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima region and characterises vendor knowledge, market composition, price structure and perceived sustainability.

Methods: Structured interviews were conducted with 93 herb vendors (ʿaṭṭārīn) across 11 markets spanning permanent urban, peri-urban/coastal and rural weekly typologies. Voucher specimens were deposited at the LAMSE/FST Tangier herbarium. Relative Frequency of Citation (RFC), Use Value (UV), Informant Consensus Factor (ICF) and Fidelity Level (FL) were recomputed from raw use reports, and market floristic similarity was assessed by Jaccard index with NMDS/PCoA ordination.

Results: The inventory comprised 83 vouchered taxa in 39 families (82 entering quantitative analysis), dominated by Lamiaceae, Apiaceae and Asteraceae, yielding 5791 use reports. Women were 54 of 93 vendors (58.1%). The most salient taxa were Trigonella foenum-graecum L. (RFC = 0.925), Zingiber officinale Roscoe (0.914) and Mentha spicata L. (0.871). Digestive ailments accounted for 2424 use reports across 30 taxa. ICF was uniformly high and market composition highly similar (mean Jaccard similarity 0.865). Declining availability was reported disproportionately for locally wild-harvested taxa.

Conclusions: Northern Moroccan markets sustain a broad but highly shared, commercially convergent MAP repertoire organised around a high-salience core of culinary-medicinal taxa. Vendor-perceived decline concentrates on wild-harvested species, identifying priority taxa for targeted ecological assessment.

Keywords: market ethnobotany; medicinal and aromatic plants; quantitative ethnobotanical indices; ʿaṭṭārīn; northern Morocco; Rif; access and benefit-sharing

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Published

2026-09-13

How to Cite

Maataoui, J., W. Bussmann, R., Abdelfattah , B. ., Khaddor , M. ., & Chouaibi, N. . (2026). Market ethnobotany at the Strait: trade, traditional knowledge, and sustainability of medicinal and aromatic plants in Northern Morocco. Ethnobotany Research and Applications, 35, 1–30. Retrieved from https://ethnobotanyjournal.org/index.php/era/article/view/8797

Issue

Vol. 35 (2026)

Section

Research

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