Use groups
How can we claasify uses?
Classifying uses in groups is a common and convenient practice. But such uses are very diverse, and group names are vague; around a core which is quite easy to define, similar uses are aggregated, up to cases which are difficult to decide. In fact, the delimitation of use groups depends on perceptions and practices of social groups, which differ according to languages and cultures, but also between diverse social groups sociaux in a given population. This explains why there is no international consensus in this field, even coming from technology or anthropology.
We must stress the fact that a given species may have many uses. A same organ can be used with different purposes; e.g., les soybeans are as well a pulse, an oil crop and a protein source for food or feed. The same product can be used in different economic sectors: e.g., turmeric and saffron are both food colorants and textile dyes.
There is a pragmatic standard recoginzed in applied or economic botany: Cook, F.E.M., 1995. Economic Botany Data Collection Standard. Prepared for the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences (TDWG). Kew, Royal Botanic Gardens. x + 146 pp. £15. ISBN 0947643710.
http://www.kew.org/tdwguses/index.htm
Another standard is used by the PROSEA and PROTA encyclopedias. PROTA standard
List of use groups followed on this site
Human food
- Cereals (including pseudo-cereals)
- Pulses
- Vegetables
- Fruits (including nuts)
- Sugar plants
- Starches
- Oil plants (in part)
- Dyes and tannins (in part)
- Spices and condiments
- Stimulants and beverage plants (including plants used for chewing or smoking)
- Food additives
Non-food uses
- Dyes and tannins (in part)
- Technical plants (industry...)
- Ornamentals (including hedge and wayside plants)
- Timbers (including bamboos used for construction)
- Auxiliary plants (including shade and nurse trees, live supports, cover crops, mulches, green manures, fallow crops, live fences, windbreaks, erosion-controlling plants, land reclamation species, and water-cleaning agents)
- Fuel plants (including plants used for the production of charcoal and as tinder)
- Medicinal plants (including poisonous plants used as pesticide, fish poison or dart poison, and narcotic plants)
- Essential oils (including aromatic woods and plants producing camphor)
- Exsudats (including plants producing latex, resin, balsam, gum, wax and aromatic resin)
- Oil plants (in part)
- Fibres (including rattans, and plants used for packing and thatching, as tying material, and for making paper, baskets, mats, wickerwork, wattle work and toothbrushes).
- Forages (including feed for fish and insects such as silkworms)
- Bee plants
- Plants used for social, magic or religious purposes
Nouveaux usages
- Industrial plants (in particular those giving a raw material for green chemistry)
- Model plants for research, or as tool for plant breeding
- Wild relatives of crops (the use of which is potential and indirect)