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19 August 2021

Exploration of the Medicinal Flora of the Aljumum Region in Saudi Arabia

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Department of Biology, Aljumum University College, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah 21955, Saudi Arabia
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Appl. Sci.2021, 11(16), 7620;https://doi.org/10.3390/app11167620
This article belongs to the Topic Frontiers in Phytochemicals
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Abstract

Understanding the natural resources of native flora in a particular area is essential to be able to identify, record, and update existing records concerning the flora of that area, especially medicinal plants. Until recently, there has been very little scientific documentation on the biological diversity of Aljumum flora. The current study aimed to document medicinal plants among the flora of this region and determine the traditional usages that are documented in the literature. In the flowering season from November 2019 to May 2020, we conducted more than 80 field trips to the study area. The results reported 90 species belonging to 79 genera and 34 families in the Aljumum region, which constitute 82 species of medicinal plants from a total of 2253 known species in Saudi Arabia. The most distributed species were Calotropis procera, Panicum turgidum, and Aerva javanica (5.31%); within four endemic families, we found Fabaceae (32.35%), Poaceae (20.58%), and Asteraceae and Brassicaceae (17.64%). The present study reviews a collection of medicinal plants in Aljumum used in ethnomedicine. Additionally, these natural resources should be preserved, and therefore, conservation programs should be established to protect the natural diversity of the plant species in this region with sustainable environmental management.

1. Introduction

With the first appearance of humans on the earth, and through the centuries, humans have relied on plants and medicinal herbs as a treatment source. Medicinal plants are a part of folk medicine, which is the primary source of modern pharmaceutical discoveries [1,2]. Medicinal plants impact global health, international trade, and the economy through the pharmaceutical industries. In terms of global health, traditional medicinal plants continue to play a central role in the health care systems of a large number of the world’s regions [2,3]. By the mid-1800s, at least 80% of all medicines were derived from plants. Then, after the scientific revolution that led to the pharmaceutical industry’s development, synthetic drugs dominated the therapeutic arena [4].
The dependence on medicinal plants as a source of folk medicine is evident in developing countries, where traditional medicine systems have long historical origins, such as in India, China, and the Arabian Peninsula [5]. Recognition of medicinal plants’ medicinal and economic benefits and their development increased in both developing and industrialized countries, despite the biological, chemical, and genetic differences between regions [6].
Herbal medicines are widely prescribed due to their remarkable effectiveness, minor side effects, and relatively low cost [7]. In Saudi Arabia, folk medicine is considered an essential aspect of people’s cultural heritage, and it was widely used before the introduction of biomedicine [8,9]. The first primary health care center using traditional medicine was established in 1926. Afterwards, the biomedicine hospitals that were founded in the second half of the twentieth century positively affected folk medicine’s increasing trend [10].
There are approximately 4 × 105 species of flowering plants known worldwide [11]. Only about 12% of them are used in traditional medicine, and about 104 species have been studied and described scientifically in alternative medicine systems [12,13,14]. The chemicals derived from higher plants make up approximately 25% of pharmaceutical drugs [15]. Legalizing medicinal plants and their derivatives is necessary when used in folk remedies [16,17]. Medicinal plants represent an essential healthy and economic component of region-specific biodiversity. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a survey of the biological diversity of medicinal plants in any country for their conservation and sustainable use and to preserve endangered medicinal species [18]. Many Saudi Arabian researchers are interested in this aspect [19,20].
Saudi Arabia has a substantial arid land area covering a significant part of the Arabian Peninsula with a geologic structure [21]. It is distinguished by several ecosystems varying in plant species diversity, comprising critical genetic resources of crop plants, medicinal plants, and xerophytic vegetation [22]. Saudi Arabia is gifted with a wide range of flora, consisting of many medicinal herbs, shrubs, and trees [23]. The flora of Saudi Arabia has about 2250 species [21]. On the other hand, the flora of Makkah district has more than 44 families, 125 genera, and 184 species. A high percentage (24.57%) of these species is used for medicinal purposes [24].
The western region of Saudi Arabia is unique in terms of its natural environment, landforms, harsh climate, and scarce water availability [21]. Previously, few floristic investigations of this region have been conducted [21,22], while numerous studies have been conducted on the floristic makeup of Saudi Arabia [25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. The Aljumum area is one of the largest governorates in the western region, with a life-form composition typical of arid and desert flora; the majority of species are therophytes and chamaephytes, with some Phanerophytes [27]. Furthermore, the flora in this area varies depending on the amount of rain and is threatened by a variety of anthropogenic activities such as urbanization, grazing, and logging [22].
Although this region has a unique diversity due to its geographical composition, there are few studies regarding plant diversity in this region. However, no ethnobotany surveys have been attempted, so there is a complete lack of information about their exploration. As a result, the Aljumum region’s flora has received insufficient attention in terms of recording its wild medicinal plants. As consequence, the purpose of this study was to conduct field surveys within the study area to record the medicinal plants that grow in the Aljumum region.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Field Investigations

Aljumum province is a governorate of the Makkah region in western Saudi Arabia and is located northwest of Makkah. The population of Aljumum is about 92,000. Its geography is characterized by mountains, valleys, and arid areas invaded by many wild plants. The climate of this region is dry, and it contains mountains, valleys, and desert areas [32]. Due to its location in the tropical region to the south, its height above sea level, and its relative distance from the Red Sea, its climate is tropical desert with very hot summers. Maximum temperatures reach 44 °C and sometimes rise to the late forties [33]. In winters, the climate is warm, with the average maximum temperature being recorded in January at around 30 °C. The average annual rainfall does not exceed 50–80 mm annually in most seasons, and most of this rain falls between November and April. In autumn, the rains are affected by the so-called region of instability, which is concentrated in the Red Sea region [32].

2.2. Plants Collection

Extensive explorations of the plant diversity of the Aljumum region was conducted during the growing season from November 2019 to May 2020 (The period has not been extended due to the restrictions of the Corona Virus pandemic) where most plant species are expected to flourish (Figure 1a). The study region’s total area is around 10,000 km2, located at 39.7137181 N, 21.6474788 E, and is divided into six districts A–F (Figure 1b). The data was gathered from 90 distinct plant samples collected from the research region, and the diversity, abundance, and different life-form spectra were determined according to Raunkiaer’s classification [34,35,36,37].
Figure 1. (a) Geographical boundaries of Aljumum Governorate. (b) Map showing the study areas divided into six zones (A, B, C, D, E, and F) and their coordinates. Google (2021), [google map for Aljumum region], https://goo.gl/maps/AKDQb3CfKQHwBoL59.

2.3. Field Trips

Six research teams were formed for field trips to collect plant samples, each team consisting of two people and a vehicle driver. Each area was visited according to the districts referred to above at a rate of two to four visits per month over a period of four months, with more than 80 field trips. The wild plant species were collected from ten territories within the study area: Aljumum city, Wadi Al-Rayan, Ayen-Shams, Al-Khaif, Rehat, Madrakah, Hada Al-Sham, Al-Fawara, Abu Urwa, and Osfan. The plant species were recorded using a quadrate of the size 10 × 10 m, distributed randomly within each site.

2.4. Plants Identification

After the field trip, the samples were initially identified according to the references of [25,26,31,38,39]. Subsequently, the plant samples were prepared and deposited at the Aljumum University College Herbarium (AUCH) in Umm Al-Qura University (UQU), Saudi Arabia, for taxonomy and confirmation of identity by taxonomy experts. Voucher specimens were preserved at the Department of Biology, Aljumum University College, UQU.

2.5. Ethnomedicinal Data

After the field trips, plant specimens were collected, serially tagged, and pressed between the blotting papers for drying [40]. Ethnomedicinal information was collected and confirmed by referring to the information sources according to [41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60].

2.6. Statistical Analyses

Descriptive statistical methods were applied to analyze and summarize plant species and families data, such as percentages, tables, chart and bar graph used Microsoft Excel 365.

3. Results

A total of 90 taxa belonging to 79 genera and 34 families were recorded and are represented in Table 1; most of the recorded species were shrubs (78%), herbs (14%), and trees (8%). The floristic diversity of the study area is shown in Figure 2. Region D was the most diverse region with frequency rates of 24.55, followed by region C, then E and B, and finally region A with percentages of 20.95%, 18.56%, 14.97%, and 10.77%, respectively. Location F was found to have little diversity, with percentages of 10.17%. Moreover, the most distributed species of flora in Aljumum are Calotropis procera, Panicum turgidum, and Aerva javanica with a percentage 5.31%, followed by Rhazya stricta, Citrullus colocynthis, Acacia ehrenbergiana Trianthema portulacastrum, and Abutilon pannosum, with a percentage of 4.25%. Some of the other species among the flora of Aljumum were distributed with a variation rate of 3.19, such as Arundo donax, Cassia italica, and Acacia tortilis. The lowest recorded percentages were 1.06–2.12% in many species, as shown in Table 1.
Table 1. The plant taxa recorded in Aljumum, family name, collection site, and distribution rate (%) within the study zones. Zones’ longitude and latitude, respectively. (A) Rehat and Madrakah: 39.721480, 21.669101; (B) Hada Al-Sham: 39.586325, 21.662486; (C) Osfan: 39.475741, 21.666860; (D) Al-Fawara: 39.700831, 21.530311; (E) Wadi Al-Rayan and Ayen-Shams: 39.614290, 21.527353; and (F) Aljumum city and Wadi Al-Rayan: 39.441392, 21.616949.
Figure 2. Flora diversity and abundance in Aljumum within the study areas.
The number and percentage of families and species of flora in Aljumum are shown in Table 2. We found 34 families, and the most prevalent was Fabaceae (32.35%) followed by Poaceae (20.58%) and Asteraceae and Brassicaceae (17.64%), while the least frequently occurring plant families were Acanthaceae, Aizoaceae, Celastraceae, Lamiaceae, Lythraceae, Moringaceae, Oleaceae, Portulacaceae, Resedaceae, Rhamnaceae, Rutaceae, Salvadoraceae, Tamaricaceae, Tiliaceae, Typhaceae, Urticaceae, and Verbenaceae with a frequency ratio of 2.94% (Figure 3). Additionally, Table 2 illustrates the abundances of the families in Aljumum compared to the flora of Saudi Arabia. Poaceae, Asteraceae and Fabaceae, Amaranthaceae, Brassicaceae, and Lamiaceae families have the highest number of species with 285, 243, 128, 93, 86, and 73, respectively, within Saudi Arabian flora, whereas Aljumum has Fabaceae, Poaceae, Brassicaceae, and Asteraceae as high-frequency species, with numbers of 11, 7, 6, and 6, respectively. However, the most frequent families in the Aljumum region, compared with their distribution in Saudi Arabia, according to their abundance or rarity were Moringaceae, Urticaceae Salvadoraceae, and Salvadoraceae, which is considered the least widespread in Saudi Arabia and was recorded among the flora of Aljumum.
Table 2. Comparison of species’ percentages for each family in the flora of Aljumum and species diversity in Saudi Arabia.
Figure 3. Family diversity abundance in Aljumum within the study areas.
Out of the 33 collected families from the flora of Aljumum, we recorded 82 plant species used as a medicinal plant using in folk remedies (Table 3). The recorded species were distributed among 32 plant families. Fabaceae was represented by nine species, followed by Brassicaceae (seven species), Poaceae and Asteraceae (six species), Solanaceae (five species), Cucurbitaceae, Amaranthaceae and Capparaceae (four species), whereas Malvaceae, Nyctaginaceae, Convolvulaceae, Apocynaceae, and Amaranthaceae had three species, and Zygophyllaceae and Euphorbiaceae had two species. All other families were represented by one species. The medicinal plants reported in Table 3 are used to treat more than 18 types of diseases, Such as congenital syphilis, rheumatic diseases, malignancies, gastrointestinal diseases, urinary disorders, certain blood disorders, as well as some neuropathies, vascular and arterial diseases, microbiological bacterial infections, liver diseases, parasitic worm infection and so on.
Table 3. Medicinal uses of ethnobotanical confined species in Aljumum region, Saudi Arabia.

4. Discussion

Saudi Arabia represents a large portion of the Arabian Peninsula, as mentioned earlier, and it is considered a large country with dynamic geographies and variable habitats. Generally, it is very rich in its biodiversity of wild plants (flora) at the level of genera, such as Acacia, Aerva, and Caralluma, or at the family level, such as Fabaceae, Poaceae, and Brassicaceae [30]. Recently, many species have been recorded among the flora of Saudi Arabia, and the number of species is increasing day by day based on new field trips and biodiversity surveys [21,29]. Initially, the number of documented species was around 1500 species, as recorded by Mujahid between 1974–1988 [39]. After 25 years, the number was increased to approximately 2300 based on many scientific publications concerning the flora of Saudi Arabia [38,61,62]. This indicates the importance of conducting more surveys in different and broad habitats in Saudi Arabia to discover the biological diversity and new species, especially medicinal plants [63,64]. This study focused on a specific region of Saudi Arabia, namely, the Aljumum Governorate, which is located northwest of Makkah. It has a wide area of land that was once known for agriculture due to the soil’s fertility and its numerous valleys [65].
The results showed 90 species from this limited area, which contains 6.44% of the species from the total flora of Saudi Arabia. This study can be considered the first study concerning the flora of Aljumum, although some studies have recorded many plant species in the Aljumum area for various research purposes [22,66,67]. The most prevalent families recorded in this study were Fabaceae and Poaceae, which are families with a typical distribution in most ecosystems in the Makkah region according to some studies that were interested in the flora of the western region of Saudi Arabia [68,69,70,71]. The findings of the current study have shown that the locations of C (Osfan), D (Al-Fawara), and E (Wadi Al-Rayan and Ayen-Shams) were the most diverse in general terms of biodiversity assessments. This result is consistent with the studies of [21,72], which suggests that this diversity is a result of variable topography among these locations and the abundance of valleys and their influence on the soils.
The current study also provides a preliminary survey of the medicinal plants in the region as it is known that traditional herbal medicine currently plays an important role as a subject of scientific research, especially when the literature and field work data are properly evaluated. These evaluation results could introduce several plants that could be prioritized in the study of specific biological activity in folk medicine [73]. Additionally, many chemical compounds can be extracted from these plants and used in the pharmaceutical industries [74,75]. These families included the most-used species in traditional medicine, such as Verbenaceae, Urticaceae, and Zygophyllaceae [76].
Recent years have seen an increase in scientific study on traditional plant medicine, particularly when the literature and fieldwork data are carefully analyzed. These evaluation findings can assist in prioritizing various plants for future research for their unique biological activity based on their traditional herbal applications and geographic distribution [73]. In this study, ethnomedicinal information was collected from 82 medicinal plants belonging to 34 families in the Aljumum region. The dominant plant families with a higher number of plant species were Fabaceae (32.35%), Poaceae (20.58%), and Asteraceae and Brassicaceae (17.64%). The use of these species may be preferred because of their ready availability. These are the most widely used medicinal plants in these families according to [77]. Some medicinal plants species (Acacia arabica, Cassia italica, Senna italica, Sorghum bicolor, Echinops viscosus, Sonchus oleraceus, and Sisymbrium irio) among these families are widespread species in local folk medicine. Herbal remedies are prepared using a variety of plant parts. However, the majority of herbal preparations are obtained from the leaves (45%), and a similar observation has been made for other forested communities with abundant leaves and green vegetation [78]. Furthermore, it is possible that the preference for leaves is due to the fact that leaves are the primary photosynthetic organ in plants and are responsible for the majority of the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, which act on the body as bioactive molecules for remediation [79]. Therefore, the leaves are responsible for photosynthesis and the release of toxins that protect the plant from environmental dangers, which adds further therapeutic value [80].
Many of the plant species recorded in the current study are preferred by herbalists for the treatment of gastrointestinal and dermatological diseases. The majority of herbalists provide oral treatments for gastrointestinal disorders in the form of decoctions and sometimes as raw ingestion. Skin diseases were the most treated ailments by herbal preparations, mainly in paste forms [81]. In Saudi Arabia, rheumatic illnesses affects 2/50,000 inhabitants [82]. However, most Saudi patients, particularly in rural regions and among the elderly, prefer to manage their condition using traditional medicines Six plant species were shown to be beneficial in the management of rheumatic illnesses in our study: Ipomoea batatas, Rhazya stricta, Ricinus communis, Salvadora persica, Solanum incanum, and Withania somnifera. This has been proven in many studies for these plant species [42,83]. Additionally, many plants have been used in traditional medicine as anti-inflammatory agents, which was shown by the results of the current study for many plant species such as Moringa peregrina, Acacia tortilis, Bougainvillea spinosa, Cordia sinensis, Cucumis melo, Echinops viscosus, Forsskaolea tenacissima, Maytenus somalensis, and Tetraena simplex, as described in some reports [84]. Among the various medicinal properties of the plant species collected from this location, anti-inflammatory and antiaromatic actions were found to be particularly useful in treating illness. Otherwise, several curative actions of various species were reported, as shown in the results. Our findings did not discover any previously unknown ethnic uses of therapeutic herbs.

5. Conclusions

The current study identified 82 species that are utilized in folk medicine among the 90 species that were surveyed from various environments throughout the Aljumum region. This study also provides a database that allows researchers to locate medicinal plants in this region for future studies to broaden the use of plant extracts in folk medicine or pharmaceutical manufacturing. The study also discussed the medical significance of these families and plant species in the treatment of various disorders. However, these natural resources must be conserved, which necessitates the establishment of conservation programs to protect the natural diversity of plant species in this region through sustainable environmental management. Researchers will have a better understanding of how varied environmental variables impact a single plant species, allowing them to analyze the impact of different environments on medicinal benefits and take advantage of the biological diversity of the vegetation in the Aljumum region.

Author Contributions

The Conceptualization, S.H.Q.; methodology and investigation, S.H.Q., A.F.A., W.F. and A.Q.; resources, A.F.A.; data curation, W.F.; writing—original draft preparation, A.Q.; writing—review and editing, S.H.Q.; supervision, S.H.Q.; project administration, S.H.Q. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

No funding received for this study.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

This data is relevant to this research.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the department of biology in Aljumum university college and the governor of Aljumum governorate for facilitating the stages of research implementation within the administrative area of the research region. Additionally, we thank Ahmed El-banhawy and Iman Nour for proofreading the manuscript. Also, we thanks graduate students Ibrahim Tarbiyyah for references formatting.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors consider themselves clear of any conflict of interest.

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