For millennia people have understood which plants are helpful for healthcare. Sadly, this knowledge is not being passed down to new generations as the perceived value of traditional methods is increasingly overlooked. People are swapping herbalism for convenience, rural life for cities and oftentimes traditional knowledge is associated with poverty and is frowned upon. 

This opposes the views of the World Health Organisation who have declared traditional medicine as a vital cornerstone of healthcare that needs protecting (1,2). Globally there is an increasing interest in natural medicines, however traditional knowledge is dwindling. This puts increasing pressure on natural resources and increases risk of misuse.

My aim with the project is to conserve the traditional medical knowledge of Cypriots and Greeks. I then want to convert this academic methodology to a citizen science method to support people who want to do this for their own communities. This gives us an opportunity for the conservation of traditional medical knowledge globally. It also gives us the opportunity to open up ethnobotany tourism in Cyprus and Greece for the growing number of people interested in the traditional way of life. 

The high-level goals of this project are to: 

• Record traditional medical knowledge in diverse ways
• Creates a citizen science method so that people are able to conduct this work for the communities they are from 
• Create a prototype of an app to document this knowledge so that people can do this work for their own communities globally
• Film a documentary of the journey to promote these conservation methods, and an ethnobotanical cultural revival.
• Create tourism opportunities for people wanting to explore this traditional way of life and integrate it into their own world

I will use the following methods for this work:

• Online surveys for people in Cyprus, Greece and the diaspora to fill out
• Focus groups and community events
• Interviews and field work
• Participant observation
• Audio/visual recordings

These are the results and findings I expect to find from each method

• Online surveys for people in Cyprus, Greece and the diaspora to fill out. This will allow us to find what plants are most commonly used and how, as well as give us leads to people with deep knowledge to conduct further questionnaires.
• Focus groups and community events. I expect this will give us more insight, and information outside of the questionnaires as well as stories and unexpected information.
• Interviews, field work, participant observation, audio/visual recordings. This will allow me to see and record how the plants are identified and processed in real life, and to make herbarium vouchers for scientifically accurate knowledge preservation. It will also allow us to do storytelling to promote this work to people and encourage them to visit and do this work for their own communities.

Conclusions and implications

This work can potentially open-up tourism avenues for people as wellness tourism, natural living and land-based spirituality tourism is booming in places like Latin America. It allows for visitors to become active participants in conservation work and can inspire them to do this in their own communities, catalysing the conservation of traditional knowledge globally.