XVI International Botanical Congess

We compared palm uses among indigenous (Yawanawá and Kaxinawá) and folk (rubber tapper and ribeirinho) communities in Southwestern Amazonia, by testing two hypotheses: 1) the use of palms differs according to the cultural niches that they occupy, and 2) indigenous communities hold most knowledge about palm resources. We compared palm uses by using semi-structured interviews, testing for differences in the mean number of uses cited and by using the Jaccard similarity index. We found that the same resources are used differently to cover the same basic needs and encountered the highest number of known palm uses in the indigenous communities, although many of these were recently acquired from other Amazonian populations.