GlobalUsefulNativeTrees, a database of 14,014 tree species and their uses, supports synergies between biodiversity recovery and local livelihoods in landscape restoration

Abstract

Tree planting has the potential to improve the livelihoods of millions of people as well as to support environmental services such as biodiversity preservation. Planting however needs to be executed wisely if benefits are to be achieved. We have developed the GlobalUsefulNativeTrees (GlobUNT) database to directly support the principles advocated by the 'golden rules for reforestation', including planting tree mixtures that maximize the benefits to local livelihoods and the diversity of native trees. Developed primarily by combining data from GlobalTreeSearch with the World Checklist of Useful Plant Species, GlobUNT includes 14,014 tree species that can be filtered for ten major use categories, across 242 countries and territories. In a subcontinental comparison GlobUNT revealed that Malesia had the highest useful tree species richness (3,349) and was also richest for materials (2,723), medicines (1,533), human food (958), fuel (734), environmental uses (632), social uses (614), animal food (443), poisons (322) and invertebrate food (266).

TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species

“…Via the WorldFlora package (version 1.10; Kindt, 2020), the master list was standardized to World Flora Online (WFO; Borsch et al, 2020; taxonomic backbone version 2021.12 downloaded from http://www.worldfloraonline.org/downloadData) and, for those species that could not be matched to WFO, to the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP; Govaerts et al, 2021; taxonomic backbone version 8 downloaded from http://sftp.kew.org/pub/data-repositories/WCVP/). Since these were the same protocols that had been used to create the 2022 version of the Agroforestry Species Switchboard (Kindt et al, 2022; Kindt, Graudal, Lillesø, et al, 2023), I first directly matched 47,728 species with species that were encountered when preparing the Switchboard , followed by using the same matching procedures for the remaining 790 species. The TreeGOER_Taxonomy file documents for each of the 48,518 species to which WFO or WCVP taxon they were standardized, further including other details such as the identifier of the taxonomic backbone database and whether the match was made as a direct match or a manual match suggested by fuzzy matching.…”