The database of chemical composition of Central Asian forage plants contains just under 1000 desert and steppe species with information such as Latin and Russian names and family and related records of chemical composition from various sources including percentages by weight of protein, ash, cellulose and fat. Where available, it also includes data on digestible protein content, metabolisable energy and Soviet Feed Units (SFU). Records also include information on the country, location, season or month and phenological phase at time of collection of each sample. As one of the original uses of the database was for modelling food and energy intake by the saiga antelope, it also includes information identifying saiga food plant species along with sources of this information. Data on the edibility of many species for livestock in different seasons are also available. See the detailed documentation available here for more information on the data types, definitions and sources. NB The database is in text format and must be imported e.g. into relational database software, as Unicode (UTF-8) in order to convert the Cyrillic characters in Russian names. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/6a5a9a2a-730b-49f7-9e42-2295040aee56