John Stanley Beard
John Stanley Beard (1916 – 17 February 2011) was a British-born forester and ecologist who resided in Australia. While working with the Forestry Division in Trinidad and Tobago during the 1940s, Beard developed a system of forest classification for Tropical America and described the forests of Trinidad, Tobago, and the Lesser Antilles; these descriptions remain standard references on the topics.
After leaving Trinidad, Beard moved to South Africa and then to Australia, where he produced an extensive series of vegetation maps covering much of the country.
His extensive surveys of Western Australia set standards for understanding regional floristic zones and biogeographical areas for the whole state. He was the main author of the 1974–1981 explanatory notes to the mapping project of the Vegetation Survey of Western Australia. He was also Director of the Kings Park and Botanic Garden for some time.
Beard received an OAM in 2003.[1] He died in February 2011 at the age of 95.[2]
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Dixon, Kingsley W. (2006) Celebration of a life in botany. (Summary: John Stanley Beard was a pioneer in cataloguing plant communities, known as "vegetation mapping", which resulted in the Vegatation Survey of Western Australia, completed in 1981, and involving road traverses totalling some 150,000 km. -- a record for an area mapped in this way by one person. Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia vol. 89, pt. 3, (Sept. 2006), p. 93-97
- ^ Mendez, Torrance (2011) Brilliant botanist shaped Kings Park The West Obituaries, page 48, The West Australian 24th February 2011
[edit] References
- Beard, J.S. (1944). "Climax vegetation of tropical America". Ecology 25 (2): 127–158. doi:10.2307/1930688. JSTOR 1930688.
- Beard, J.S. (1955). "The classification of Tropical American vegetation-types". Ecology 36 (1): 89–100. doi:10.2307/1931434. JSTOR 1931434.
- Beard, J.S. 1990. Checklist of the coastal flora of the South-West Botanical Province, Western Australia. Kingia, Vol. 1, no. 3 (1990), p. 255-281,
[edit] Interview
- Interview with Alice Smith in 1986 - Held in Battye Library 3rd Floor Oral History OH1735 A/r 2 sound cassettes.with Transcript (typescript, 22 p.) Director of Kings Park. Talks about establishment of and highlights of his time there 1961-1970. Includes personal background. http://henrietta.liswa.wa.gov.au/record=b1794327~S2 .
