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Plant Resources of Tropical Africa (PROTA)

By delivering botanical information to a wide audience. PROTA is working towards securing sustainable plant resources for people throughout tropical Africa. Photo credit: R.R. Schippers.

The PROTA (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa) Foundation is an international venture aimed at improving public access to interdisciplinary data on the useful flora of tropical Africa, with due respect for traditional knowledge and intellectual property. Kew has been a collaborating partner in PROTA since its inception in 2000, and hosts the UK Country Office.

PROTA is concerned with realising the potential for botanical resources to contribute to poverty alleviation. Central to this objective is an illustrated encyclopaedia of approximately 7,000 plant species used in tropical Africa. The bilingual (English and French) species review articles are freely available online (www.prota.org), and published as a low-cost handbook series, and on CD. By early 2006, species review articles were available in the volumes Vegetables, Cereals and pulses and Dyes and tannins. Sixteen volumes, covering 3,500 species, will be published by 2008.

Requirements such as in situ conservation or suitable technology for processing, needed to realise a species' potential as a commodity, are detailed in condensed volumes. These products are geared towards PROTA's target audience in the public and private sectors. In another commitment to improving access to botanical information for resource management, PROTA supports field projects to enhance information accessibility in each country of the African PROTA network.

PROTA maintains several behind-the-scenes databases to support the compilation of species review articles; among them are collections of species images and distribution maps, and two bibliographic databases. They contain citations and abstracts of over 360,000 globally-available publications, and over 13,000 publications with limited availability, intensively gathered throughout Africa, France and the UK. At Kew, key contributions ate made to sourcing suitable material from throughout the UK, as well as supporting other facets of PROTA's work on informing the sustainable use of plants in tropical Africa.

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