The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining: standardization of 830 prioritized species to World Flora Online version 2023.12

The GlobalUsefulNativeTrees database (GlobUNT; https://patspo.shinyapps.io/GlobalUsefulTrees/; Kindt et al. 2023) allows users to filter native useful tree species for any country in the world. One of the filters in this database refers to the The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining (Kindt et al. 2021). A version of GlobUNT will be released in 2026 that includes all 830 species listed in the prioritized list, whereas not all species were included in older versions.  

This archive provides standardizations to the same taxonomic backbone of World Flora Online (Borsch et al. 2020; taxonomic backbone version 2023.12; Kindt 2020) as used for standardizations included in GlobUNT. It is also the same taxonomic backbone, and the same standardization protocols, that were used for the 2025 update of the Agroforestry Species Switchboard (Kindt et al. 2025). Hence crosslinking to databases listed in the Switchboard to obtain details for species of interest should be straightforward; a direct hyperlink to the Switchboard is also included in the archive.

One of the columns in the archive indicates whether information on the environmental distribution of a species is available from the TreeGOER (Kindt 2023; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7922927) or TreeGOER+ (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11208040) databases.

References

• Kindt, R., Graudal, L., Lillesø, JP.B. et al. GlobalUsefulNativeTrees, a database documenting 14,014 tree species, supports synergies between biodiversity recovery and local livelihoods in landscape restoration. Sci Rep 13, 12640 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39552-1
• Kindt R, Dawson IK, Lillesø J-PB, Muchugi A, Pedercini F, Roshetko JM, van Noordwijk M, Graudal L, Jamnadass R. 2021. The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining. Working Paper No. 312. World Agroforestry, Nairobi, Kenya. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5716/WP21001.PDF
• Borsch, T., Berendsohn, W., Dalcin, E., Delmas, M., Demissew, S., Elliott, A., Fritsch, P., Fuchs, A., Geltman, D., Güner, A., Haevermans, T., Knapp, S., le Roux, M.M., Loizeau, P.-A., Miller, C., Miller, J., Miller, J.T., Palese, R., Paton, A., Parnell, J., Pendry, C., Qin, H.-N., Sosa, V., Sosef, M., von Raab-Straube, E., Ranwashe, F., Raz, L., Salimov, R., Smets, E., Thiers, B., Thomas, W., Tulig, M., Ulate, W., Ung, V., Watson, M., Jackson, P.W. and Zamora, N. (2020), World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants. TAXON, 69: 1311-1341. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12373
• Roeland Kindt, Ilyas Siddique, Ian Dawson, Innocent John, Fabio Pedercini, Jens-Peter B. Lillesø, Lars Graudal. 2025. The Agroforestry Species Switchboard, a global resource to explore information for 107,269 plant species. Sci Data 12, 1150 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05492-w
• Kindt, R. 2020. WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data. Applications in Plant Sciences 8(9): e11388. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11388
• Kindt, R. (2023). TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Global Change Biology, 00, 1–16. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16914. 

Funding

The development of the GlobalUsefulNativeTrees database was supported by the Darwin Initiative to project DAREX001 of Developing a Global Biodiversity Standard certification for tree-planting and restoration, by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative through the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ethiopia to the Provision of Adequate Tree Seed Portfolio project in Ethiopia, by the Green Climate Fund through the IUCN-led Transforming the Eastern Province of Rwanda through Adaptation project and through the Readiness proposal on Climate Appropriate Portfolios of Tree Diversity for Burkina Faso, by the Bezos Earth Fund to the Quality Tree Seed for Africa in Kenya and Rwanda project and by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) to the regional tree seed programme on The Right Tree for the Right Place for the Right Purpose in Africa.