Home > Exploration of Floral Diversity of District Kotli Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Evaluation of Ethnopharmacological Effects of Some Medicinal Plants of the Area
Exploration of Floral Diversity of District Kotli Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Evaluation of Ethnopharmacological Effects of Some Medicinal Plants of the Area
In the investigated area, District Kotli, Azad Jammu & Kashmir, a total of 401 plant species belonging to 104 families were recorded. Among these, single species of family Pinaceae represented gymnosperms, while rest of the plant species represented the dicot and monocot Angiosperms. Ethnobotanical survey of almost all the villages of District, Kotli was carried out by interviewing local people on the basis of random selection through a questionnaire during 2009-2011. People of this area had their distinct way of life, beliefs, traditions and the way of utilization of local plants for various purposes especially as medicinal plants over generations. Out of 401 plant species 209 (52.11%) were used as single-usage, 107 (26.68%) were two-usage, 68 (16.95%) were multi-usage and 17(4.23%) were plant species with no local human usage. The plants were photographed (Pl. 1-24), collected, properly pressed, mounted on the herbarium sheets, identified through taxonomic literature and deposited in Dr. Sultan Ahmed Herbarium, Department of Botany, GC University, Lahore as voucher specimens. The Phytosociological studies were carried out by using Quadrat method, of six Hill-sites viz; Dungi Mansuh Hills, Nakiyal Maira Hills, Sney Bney Hills, Sarsawa Hills, Darguti Hills and Rajdahni Hills. A total of 25 plant Communities were recognized as a whole in the area. It was noticed that Pinus roxburghii Sargent commonly called Chir was a dominant tree species along with a grass, Themeda anathera (Nees.ex Steud.) Hack. locally called Bahari Ghass in almost all 25 plant communities. The associated species were Olea ferruginea Royle and Acacia modesta Wall. along with Casearia tomentosa Roxb., Colebrookea oppositifolia Smith., Cotinus coggyria Scop., Dodonaea viscosa (L.) Jacq., Dalbergia sissoo Roxb. ex DC., Erioscirpus comosus (Wall.) Palla, Malvastrum coromandelianum (L.) Garcke, Mallotus philippensis (Lamk.) Muell. Arg., Micromeria biflora Benth., Otostegia limbata (Bth.) Bioss., Rubus fruticosus Hk., Trichodesma indica (L.) R. Br., Wendlandia exerta (Roxb.)DC. and Woodfordia fruiticosa (L.) S. Kurz. Some species needed protection and conservation due to their low I.V.I. such as. Engelhardtia colebrookeana Lindl., Eremostachys superba Royle ex.Benth., Gloriosa superba L., Helinus lanceolatus Wall. ex Brandis, Holmskioldia sanguinea Retz, Melhania futteyporensis Munro ex Masters, Onosma thomsonii C.B. Clarke and Prinsepia utilis Royle. Phytosociological data showed the degraded vegetation in the study area mainly due to over population by nomads. In order to verify ethnobotanical data on practical lines the ethnopharmacological effects, such as antimicrobial including MIC and antioxidant activities of the crude extracts of two dicot plants; viz. Helinus lanceolatus Wall. ex Brandis (bark and leaves) and Holmskioldia sanguinea ii Retz. (bark and leaves) and two monocot; viz. Iris aitchisonii (Bakar) Boiss. (whloe plant) and Notholirion thomsonianum (D.Don) Stapf (whole plant) were investigated using Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and fungi. The maximum zone of inhibition was produced by aqueous extracts of Iris aitchisonii against Aspergillus niger (fungus) and methanolic extracts of Helinus lanceolatus against Escherichia coli with 57±1.0mm and 50±1.15mm respectively. The Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) was most significant in Iris aitchisonii against Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, i.e. 0.002μg/ml and 0.008mg/ml of Helinus lanceolatus against S. aureus and P. aeruginosa while 0.010mg/ml of methanolic extract of Holmskioldia sanguinea against Escherichia coli. The resistance of methanolic extract of Notholirion thomsonianum was found potent against S. aureus, i.e. 0.009 μg/ml. The significant IC50 values (concentration of sample required to scavenge 50% free radical) was observed in aqueous extract of Helinus lanceolatus, i.e.15.29± 0.59 as compared with BHT (standard antioxidant) which was 12.52.±0.89. It was observed that Petroleum ether extract of Iris aitchisonii has highest total antioxidant activity, i.e. 1.1820±0.33 followed by Petroleum ether extract of Holmskioldia sanguinea, i.e., 1.142±0.34. The Petroleum ether extract of Helinus lanceolatus showed highest FRAP value (90.66±4.54μg of trolox equivalent). Total phenolic compounds were highest in petroleum ether extract of Helinus lanceolatus, i.e. 56±1.91 mg/g followed by methanolic extract and petroleum ether extract of Notholirion thomsonianum, i.e. 47±0.59mg/g and 45±0.85mg/g respectively. The percentage of inhibition of lipid peroxidation was highest in methanolic extract which was 59.11±0.12%). Overall all four medicinal plants indicated reasonable antimicrobial and significant antioxidant activities, thus supporting their traditional medicinal practices/uses. On the basis of the results, it can be concluded that the study area was under heavy deforestation, overgrazing and biotic interference. Low regeneration and high exploitation of economically and medicinally valuable plants exposed many species to risk of extinction. The recommendations are made for the sustainable utilization, proper management and conservation of the flora of the study area.
The study examines English as Foreign Language (EFL) students’ attitude towards developing their speaking abilities at KRI University in order to better understand the disparities in speaking competency among undergraduates. The study utilized a quantitative approach and employed a 4-item interview survey to gather data for the study. The survey interview questionnaire was adopted from Wang, Kim, Bong, and Ahan (2013) and administered to 100 students in the departments of English of six universities in Iraq's Kurdistan Region. A semi-structured interview was developed for EFL students. The questionnaire was online and an open-ended one. The data from the participants was analyzed using thematic analysis with (SPSS) software. The finding revealed a perceived failure in EFL students' English-speaking skills and this was reported along with causes of the perceived difficulty. The finding also revealed a poor level of speaking ability among EFL undergraduates as well as little education in the skill at the university level. Apart from these, the study discovered some major challenges for EFL students such as lack of confidence, lack of planning, a demotivating atmosphere, incorrect word choice, poor gestures, and incorrect style which made the students not to be successful in their speaking abilities. The study suggested that EFL learners' competency should be securitized to strengthen their speaking abilities in the light of the results of the study. Speaking is a crucial ability in language acquisition and EFL teachers should help their students acquire it. As a means of improving students' communicative ability, task-based instruction should be utilized in educational institutions and universities. The implication of this paper is that speaking difficulties among EFL students in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region institution can be solved by putting greater focus on this ability. There are several issues to consider, including teachers, instructional methodologies, the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and assessment rules.
Time is deemed as paramount aspect in Information Retrieval (IR) and it pro foundly influence the interpretation as well as the users intention and expectation. The temporal patterns in a document or collection of documents plays a central role in the effectiveness of IR systems. The accurate discernment plays an immense role in persuading the time-based intention of a user. There exists a plethora of documents on the web wherein most on them contain the divergent temporal pat terns. Assimilation of these temporal patterns in IR is referred to as Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR). The comprehension of TIR systems is requisite to address the temporal intention of a user in an efficient manner. For time specific queries (i.e. query for an event), the relevant document must relate to the time period of the event. To attenuate the problem, the IR systems must: determine whether the document is temporal specific (i.e. focusing on single time period) and determine the focus time (to which the document content refers) of the documents. This thesis exploits the temporal features of the news documents to improve the retrieval effectiveness of IR systems.As best to our knowledge, this thesis is the pioneer study that focuses on the problem of temporal specificity in news docu ments. This thesis defines and evaluate novel approaches to determine the tem poral specificity in news documents. Thereafter, these approaches are utilized to classify news documents into three novel temporal classes. Furthermore, the study also considers 24 implicit temporal features of news documents to classify in to; a) High Temporal Specificity (HTS), b) Medium Temporal Specificity (MTS), and c) Low Temporal Specificity (LTS) classes. For such classification, Rule-based and Temporal Specificity Score (TSS) based classification approaches are proposed. In the former approach, news documents are classified using a proposed set of rules that are based on temporal features. The later approach classifies news documents based on a TSS score using the temporal features. The results of the proposed approaches are compared with four Machine Learning classification algorithms: Bayes Net, Support Vector Machine (SVM),Random Forest and Decision Tree. x The outcomes of the study indicate that the proposed rule-based classifier outper forms the four algorithms by achieving 82% accuracy, whereas TSS classification achieves 77% accuracy. In addition, to determine the focus time of news documents, the thesis contem plates the temporal nature of news documents. The type and structure of doc uments influence the performance of focus time detection methods. This thesis propose different splitting methods to split the news document into three logical sections by scrutinizing the inverted pyramid news paradigm. These methods in clude: the Paragraph based Method (PBM), the Words Based Method (WBM), the Sentence Based Method (SBM), and the Semantic Based Method (SeBM). Temporal expressions in each section are assigned weights using a linear regres sion model. Finally, a scoring function is used to calculate the temporal score for each time expression appearing in the document. Afterwards, these temporal expressions are ranked on the basis of their temporal score, where the most suit able expression appears on top. Two evaluation measures are used to evaluate the performance of proposed framework, a) precision score (P@1, P@2) and average error years. Precision score at position 1 (P@1) and position 2 (P@2) represent the correct estimation of focus at the top 2 positions in the ranked list of focus time whereas, average error year is the distance between the estimated year and the actual focus year of news document. The effectiveness of proposed method is evaluated on a diverse dataset of news related to popular events; the results re vealed that the proposed splitting methods achieved an average error of less than 5.6 years, whereas the SeBM achieved a high precision score of 0.35 and 0.77 at positions 1 and 2 respectively. The overall findings presented in this thesis demonstrate that the valuable tempo ral insights of documents can be used to enhance the performance of IR systems. The time aware information retrieval systems can adopt these findings to satisfy the user expectation for temporal queries.