A new technique for testing distribution of knowledge and to estimate sampling sufficiency in ethnobiology studies

Using data collected in northeastern Brazil, we evaluated how these new estimators of richness and sharing behave for different categories of use.We observed trends in the distribution of the characteristics of informants. We were also able to evaluate how outliers interfere with these analyses and how other analyses may be conducted using these indices, such as determining the distance between the knowledge of a community and that of experts, as well as exhibiting the importance of these individuals' communal information of biological resources. One of the primary applications of these indices is to supply the researcher with an objective tool to evaluate the scope and behavior of the collected data.Over the past several years, especially since the 1990s, many techniques for the quantitative analysis of traditional botanical knowledge have been proposed. Perhaps some of the most popular techniques are the use value proposed by Phillips and Gentry [1,2] and the relative importance proposed by Bennett and Prance [3]. In general, these proposals are within the scope of a set of techniques (referred to as the "consensus of informants") aimed at assessing the relative importance of a given resource using the consensus of the informants' responses. A set of techniques that is less popular but has long been the subject of discussion was proposed to assess the so-called "cultural importance" of a resource (plants, for example); this set was labeled in its generality as "subjective allocation techniques" [4,5]. The subjective allocation techniques have been harshly criticized because the researcher must compute, according to his vision, priority scores in order to assign importance to a resource. Today, over 80 different techniques incorporate computations that appear to have the same goals. Medeiros et al. [6] as certain that many new technical proposals do not actually introduce new features but serve only to inflate the literature; their creation is unnecessary, due to t