Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, known by its acronym PROTA, is a retired database and international ethnobotanical programme concerned with making traditional knowledge and scientific information about natural dyes, natural fibers, medicinal plants, tropical timbers, vegetables, and other useful plants accessible in Africa, supporting their sustainable use to preserve culture, reduce poverty and hunger, and respond to climate change.

PROTA’s stated mission is to synthesize all the information available for approximately 8,000 plants used in tropical Africa, and make it widely accessible in various media. In other words, PROTA is dedicated to making the lesser-known useful biodiversity of tropical Africa better known. Some of PROTA's other goals included:

• to promote the sustainable use of plants to the public and private sectors
• to facilitate collaborative research about African plants from experts in Africa and elsewhere
• to make research about African plants more accessible to speakers of major African languages
• to support intellectual property rights related to the commercial use of African plants
• to help graduate students and researchers identify research gaps
• to provide research-driven educational materials to farmer education programs

Unfortunately, the programme had to stop in 2013 due to fund shortage. The database Prota4U is still active in an archive-like capacity with articles written in English and French. The database information can also be accessed at the website Pl@ntUse. As of March 2019, Prota4U had about 1,500 daily visitors and 500,000 unique visitors each year.[1]

Partners

The programme operated through an international network of institutional partners and collaborators of the PROTA Foundation. PROTA had representatives in 20 African countries and dual headquarters in Wageningen, Netherlands and Nairobi, Kenya. PROTA had regional offices with partners at the following institutions.[2]

Publications

The PROTA Handbook is an illustrated encyclopaedia of utility plant species found in Tropical Africa. The species reviews contained in each volume are available on CD-ROM, and for free from PROTA online. PROTA plans to publish review articles on some 8,000 plants.[3]

The PROTA Handbook encyclopedia series is unusual because it is compiled as much from obscure publications as it is from peer-reviewed and popular literature, gathered throughout Africa and Europe. Species review articles are written by authors from around the world, and cover a range of information. A 2006 book review of PROTA 3: Dyes and tannins published in Economic Botany noted that "the information contained in this volume highlights a number of lesser known species, and is a rich source of interesting information for anyone working at the interface of ethnobotany and domestication, and as such is a must have."[4] A 2014 book review of PROTA 11(2): Medicinal Plants noted that about one-third of the contributions were written by African ethnobotanists[5]

PROTA4U

The PROTA web database PROTA4U is a combination of PROTA’s highly standardized expert-validated review articles (PROTAbase) and yet-to-be-validated ‘starter kits’ for all other useful plants. These ‘starter kits’ are pre-filled with basic information from PROTA’s databases SPECIESLIST (important synonyms, uses, basic sources of information) and AFRIREFS (‘grey’ literature).

Furthermore, the records contain the results of a meta-analysis from a large collection of agricultural and botanical databases, conducted successfully in cooperation with the ICON Group International.[6] The websites, which allowed their databases to be harvested, are properly acknowledged in the ‘starter kits’.

See also

• Tropical Africa
• Afrotropical realm
• Ecology of Africa
• International Tropical Timber Organization
• International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service
• Natural environment
• Biodiversity
• Climate change
• CTA (credit point system)
• Neglected and underutilized crops
• Ethnobotany
• Botany
• African Studies
• African Languages
• Traditional African Medicine
• Pharmacopeia

References

External links

• PROTA on the Pl@ntUse wiki
• AAMPS - Association for African Medicinal Plants Standards
• Phytotrade
• ITTO - International Tropical Timber Organization