Plant Resource Availability of Medicinal Fritillaria Species in Traditional Producing Regions in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

The genus Fritillaria (Liliaceae) comprises of ~140 species of bulbous perennials, which are distributed in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Fritillaria species have attracted much attention because of their commercial value, partly as ornamental plants but principally as a source of material for use in traditional medicine. The use of Fritillaria extracts is well established in some countries in Eastern Europe (e.g., Turkey), and Asia (e.g., China, Japan). In traditional Chinese medicine, the medicinal Fritillaria species is called Bulbus Fritillariae Cirrhosae (BFC), which has been used as a traditional medicine for thousands of years. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reports on resource investigation of plants of BFC in the last ten years. In this study, we chose 32 traditional producing regions in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to perform an investigation on resource availability of BFC. In five sites we did not find any plants of BFC. Results show that the average number of the plants of BFC per quadrat in 26 sites was less than 7, and the average resource density was