Plant Resources of Tropical Africa

Jatropha from the Protabase

Plant Resources of Tropical Africa (PROTA), an international not-for-profit foundation is synthesizing dispersed information about the approximately 7,000 useful plants of tropical Africa and providing wide access to the information through its web site and publications. Target groups for PROTA information are decision-makers in government, private sector, research, education and rural development, whose decisions affect people depending for their livelihood on plant resources. The organization's web site, hosted by Wageningen University in the Netherlands, provides access to Protabase -- its searchable database of plants, and a list of its commodity groups publications, links to partner organizations and other plant databases, and a news section that recently reported work of the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species (GFU).