The ethnobotany, particularly the relationship between people and forests, of the Dolok Sibual-buali Nature Reserve Area was studied. The villages around the Nature Reserve are traditionally established away from forests and agricultural areas and are inhabited by the Batak ethnic group. Within the village, houses are built closed to each other without home-garden. The village is usually surrounded by sawah (paddy-fields), ladangs, and forests at the outer edge. Five out of 15 villages around the Dolok Sibual-buali Nature Reserve are remote and far away from the center of community activities. The magnitude of dependency on the forest products of the people in the remote villages is relatively greater than do the people in the other villages. The people in the remote villages utilize the Nature Reserve as resources for traditional medicine, home industry, and daily needs such as food, including resources of traditional food industry, fire woods and construction materials.