The following gaps in data regarding medicinal plants have been identified:

Surveys
Thorough surveys of all presently known and potential medicinal plants of Northern Areas needs to be carried out. There are more such plants in this area than are currently well known and they need to be identified and catalogued.

Status
The status of many medicinal plants is not known. Surveys need to be done to establish the status and if they are threatened, then the level of threat needs to be determined, i.e., whether they are endangered, vulnerable etc.

Cost analysis and marketing
Detailed cost analysis of all the procedures related to major medicinal plants needs to be done along the lines of the one conducted by WWF-Pakistan. Analysis should involve aspects such as plant/berry picking, product preparation and marketing. This would help determine a fair price for the farmer who at present generally sells the plant at any price that the middlemen are willing to offer or expects a higher price than he can get realistically.

Intellectual property rights
The area of patenting and intellectual property rights of medicinal plant products needs greater attention. As more plants are recognized and bought by companies, this issue will become more important. The situation presently is that the knowledge of local people which is crucial to drug development generally go unrewarded. But times are changing and the matter of financial compensation for indigenous botanical knowledge has gained attention. In the Northern Areas too, therefore, this matter needs closer scrutiny.

Status of traditional knowledge
Although there is anecdotal evidence and a general feeling that traditional ethnobotanical knowledge is being lost steadily due to greater acceptance of allopathic medicine, there is no systematic survey to determine this. Studies should be conducted to establish how much of such knowledge is being retained or lost by successive generations because that would help in preserving such knowledge in the long run.