Spatial patterns, availability and cultural preferences for edible plants in southern Africa

We investigated whether cross-cultural food plant selection in southern Africa is best explained by language ancestry, floristic environment or subsistence strategy.

Location: The flora of southern Africa region.
Taxa: All 1740 edible plant taxa of southern Africa, representing 711 genera in 156 families.

Methods: Distribution data of plants were overlapped in ArcMap with 19 language maps, eight biomes and all taxa with nutritional data. Six correlations were estimated between five pair-wise distance matrices (language ancestry, geographical proximity, floristic and edible environments and utilised species) with Mantel tests using the ‘vegan’ package in R. Regression analyses were used to identify floristic and cultural preferences in food plant selection.

Results: Spatial autocorrelation did not influence the selection of edible plants by the 19 language groups of southern Africa (r = -0.078). The floristic and edible environments had a strong correlation (r = 0.9743) while t...