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Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh

George Argent obtained a BSc in Botany from the University of Leicester and a PhD in Botany from the University of North Wales, Bangor. From 1969 to 1973 he was a research fellow for the New Guinea Biological Foundation in charge of a project to collect and study a gene pool of Musa (bananas). In 1974 he was appointed as tropical botanist to the RBGE and is now head of the tropical section. He has worked on the taxonomy of tropical Ericaceae particularly Vaccinium, Diplycosia and Rhododendrons of section Vireya. He has undertaken vegetational survey work in Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia and done extensive field work in S.E. Asia over the last 25 years. He headed the taxonomic subproject to produce field guides to non dipterocarp tree species in Central Kalimantan as part of the DFID Indonesian Forest Management Project and has advised the EU; Leuser Ecosystem project in Sumatra.

David Chamberlain hold a BA and DPhil. "Taxonomic Studies in the Genus Pottia" from Oxford University. He is currently Curator of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. His main interests are in the systematics of the Chinese Flora in particular in the Genera Rhododendron and Berberis. However, work carried out between 1966 and 1971 as Assistant Editor on the Flora of Turkey and knowledge of SW Asian Floras led to contributions to Flora Iranica and, more recently, to the RBGE based Flora of Arabia. Dr. Chamberlain has carried out extensive field studies, SW China and Northern Vietnam. He has been involved in a Darwin Initiative funded project for Rhododendron Conservation in China. He is also a member of the group advising the National Trust for Scotland on policy matter concerning its Gardens.

Ian Edwards is Head of the Public Education Department of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He manages the Garden's diverse education and exhibition programmes, which includes community education, school visits, teacher training, outreach, public talks and events such as the Edinburgh International Science Festival. His background is in ecology and ethnobotanical research and he has worked on conservation and education projects in Indonesia, Cameroon, Malawi, Australia and the Scottish Highlands. He is the author or editor of a wide range of publications including the Natural History of Seram and the WWF Green Inheritance Pack. A particular interest is the relationship between the cultural and ecological value of trees. In addition to his duties at RBGE, he is an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University, an adviser to several voluntary organisations, including the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and is involved in the practical management of two small, native woods.

Martin Gardner has extensive experience and training in Horticulture from Berkshire College of Agriculture, Askham Bryan College of Agriculture and Horticulture and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He joined the staff of RBGE in 1991, following seven years as Assistant Keeper in the Gardens of Windsor Great Park. He is the Co-ordinator of the Edinburgh International Conifer Conservation Programme, an initiative for the world-wide conservation of threatened conifer species involving both in situ and ex situ programmes. Much of his research has been concentrated in Chile, New Caledonia, Vietnam and the Caribbean but he also has field experience in Mexico, Sabah, Taiwan and many southern European countries.

David Harris

David Harris has a BSc (Hons) in Botany from University of Edinburgh and DPhil from Oxford. He is Herbarium Curator looking after almost 3 million specimens held at the RBGE. He is a taxonomist specialising in tropical forest floras. He has field experience in Belize, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Nigeria and Republic of Congo. He is interested in identification, forest ecology and sustainable forestry.

Pete Hollingsworth obtained a BSc (Hons) Biological Sciences from Wolverhampton Polytechnic and a PhD from the University of Leicester . After working as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Glasgow as part of the NERC Taxonomy Initiative, he joined RBGE in 1997. His research focuses on using molecular genetic technologies to study population genetics and evolution. This includes assessing patterns of clonal diversity, studying gene flow dynamics and population structure, and investigating hybridisation and species relationships, as well as evaluating the molecular tools themselves. Much of his research involves rare species, and he has a strong interest in the integration of genetic data into conservation and species management programmes.

Kwiton Jong gained his BSc (Hons) in Botany and subsequent MSc at Witwatersrand University in South Africa. His first lectured at Wits and moved to University of Singapore in 1957. From 1960 to 1965 he held a lectureship at the University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and then in 1965 was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He was awarded a PhD from Edinburgh University in 1970. He moved to Aberdeen University in 1967 as lecturer (later Senior Lecturer) in Tropical Botany, where he remains an Honorary Senior Lecturer. He then became a Principal Research Fellow in Cytotaxonomy at the RBGE up till 1999, and is now an Honorary Research Associate there. His main research interests are reproductive biology and cytogenetics of tropical rain forest trees (Dipterocarpaceae), now collaborating with taxonomists in studies that elucidate the relationship between chromosomes, taxonomy and evolution (cytotaxonomy) mainly of African plants. His research was funded by various sources, including Royal Society, Leverhulme, DFID, and Sibbald Trust.

David Middleton

David Middleton has a BSc (Hons) in Botany from Aberdeen University and a PhD from Aberdeen University with a thesis title of 'Taxonomic Studies in the genus Gaultheria and related genera (Ericaceae)'. This was completed in 1989. Since then he has worked in the School of Botany of Trinity College Dublin; the Rijksherbarium in Leiden, the Netherlands; Harvard University Herbaria, USA; and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. His research focus in this period was on the taxonomy of the plant family Apocynaceae in Southeast Asia. Many of the Asian genera have been revised and flora accounts have been prepared for Thailand; Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; Sabah and Sarawak; and Malesia. He has been on or led plant collecting expeditions in Ecuador, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. His current research focus is on the genus Aeschynanthus in the Gesneriaceae.

Tony Miller gained a BSc in Botany followed by an MSc in Flowering Plant Taxonomy from the University of Reading. He then joined the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1974 and has spent the past 27 years concentrating his research on SW Asia and, in particular, the flora of the Arabian Peninsula. During this period he has gained considerable field experience across the region and has been involved with a number of expeditions to Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Socotra and Iran. His work on the flora of southern Oman from 1985-88 resulted in the publication Plants of Dhofar - the Southern Region of Oman, traditional, economic and medicinal uses. Since 1985 he has been co-ordinating and editing the "Flora of the Arabian Peninsula and Socotra". In recent years he has been co-ordinating various aspects of a major conservation programme in the Socotra Archipelago including leading the terrestrial component of two large GEF and Darwin projects.

Dr William Milliken has over 13 years experience in applied multi-disciplinary research and consultancy. He has worked at all levels from Government to local/ NGO, and has extensive regional field experience in Latin America (Brazil, Ecuador & Venezuela), India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and New Guinea. He has specialised particularly in biodiversity and the environment, economic botany and ethnobotany, with a focus on natural resource utilisation and indigenous communities. His work has covered a range of environmental and social fields together with conservation, education, health and development issues. He also has extensive experience in biodiversity assessment and ecological/ phyto-sociological zoning, and a broad knowledge of tropical plant taxonomy. Assignments have included the provision of specific information and advice to Brazilian governmental and non-governmental organisations on biodiversity, conservation units, indigenous peoples and rural health care. He has also provided project evaluations, according to established guidelines and procedures, to the UK Government. He is experienced in design, planning and implementation of international inter-disciplinary projects.

Mark Newman gained his BSc (Hons) in Botany from St Andrews University and then did a PhD on 'Aspects of cytotaxonomy and reproductive biology of some Zingiberaceae' at the University of Aberdeen, which he completed in 1988. While working on his PhD, he undertook field studies in the forests of southern Thailand, at the Danum Valley Field Centre in Sabah. He also wrote a report on a potentially economically important group of plants in SE Asia for a commercial company. Soon after graduating from Aberdeen University he spent four months in Vietnam providing botanical support to an ornithological project. From 1990-93 he was employed as Seed Collector for Latin America by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which included expeditions to Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, USA and Venezuela. From 1993-1998 he worked as a tropical plant taxonomist for ABW Associates Ltd, based at RBGE. He was involved in a project producing field guides of the commercial dipterocarp timbers of SE Asian rainforests. Some of these were published in Indonesian in 1998 and in 1999 a CD-ROM of all the dipterocarp manuals plus extra description of Peninsular Malaysian species will come out. In November 1998 Mark Newman was taken onto the staff of RBGE for two years as part of a project to design a new kind of taxonomic database. Funding for this comes from the BBSRC/EPSRC Bioinformatics Initiative and supports work at Napier University, Edinburgh as well as RBGE. His main responsibility is to revise Globba, a genus in the ginger family, and in so doing, to act as a model taxonomist to test the new database.

Dr Richard Pankhurst began his career in computing in the computer section at CERN, Geneva in 1963, and moving back to Cambridge to work on Computer-Aided Design in 1966. In 1971 he moved to the Botany School, Cambridge to begin work on his PANKEY programs for identification and key construction. This was continued at the Botany department of the Natural History Museum from 1974 until 1991, where he was for many years curator of the British herbarium, and also worked on the Flora Meso-Americana. "Biological Identification" 1978, was the first textbook on computer methods in identification. A new version of this book was published by C.U.P in 1991. Also published in that year was the Flora of the Outer Hebrides. He has been very active recently in programming and managing botanical databases for taxonomy (Euro + Med Plantbase, BSBI database and PANDORA) and systems with images.

David Paterson holds a Master of Arboriculture from the Royal Forestry Society and a Diploma in Horticulture from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Arboricultural Association. He has worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh since 1981, where he is currently Deputy Director of Horticulture. He has lectured on horticultural and arboricultural topics in Britain, Europe and the USA and undertaken consultancies in Britain China and Uganda. He has also participated in plant collecting expeditions to China and the USA. He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship for the RBGE Expedition to Taiwan.

Colin Pendry works on the Flora of Nepal project at RBGE, writing accounts and coordinating contributions from other authors. Previous experience includes a study of the biogeography of Latin American seasonally dry forests, contributing to field guides to forest trees as part of the ODA (now DFID) Indonesian Forest Management Project, writing accounts for the Flora of Thailand and the Flore du Cambodge, du Laos et du Vietnam whilst based at Trinity College Dublin, teaching a course in Plant Geography at Khon Kaen University, Thailand and capacity building and curriculum development projects in Nepal and Indonesia. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Botany in 1987 and from the University of Stirling with a PhD in Tropical Ecology in 1994. His PhD was a study of floristics, nutrient cycling and altitudinal zonation on Bukit Belalong, Brunei.

Toby Pennington joined the Tropical Biology section at RBGE in 1994 after completing a PhD at Oxford University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He is a taxonomist, specialising in Latin American Leguminosae (pea family) with particular emphasis on the use of modern molecular systematic techniques. Over the last 10 years he has carried out fieldwork in eight Latin American countries. Current projects include: 1. Writing taxonomic accounts of important genera of legumes (Andira, Dussia, Cyclolobium); 2. Biogeographic and floristic studies of Latin American seasonally dry forests; 3. Molecular systematic studies of the economically important genus Inga (in collaboration with ICRAF);4. Darwin Initiative funded project "tree diversity and agroforestry development in the Peruvian Amazon" (in collaboration with Universidad Agraria de La Molina, Lima and ICRAF).

David Rae holds a BSc and MSc in Horticulture from the University of Bath and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in the management and use of the living collections in botanic gardens. He joined the RBGE in 1978 and spent 21 years lecturing to the Garden's horticultural students. In 2000 he was appointed Director of Horticulture at RBGE with responsibilities for the horticultural management of the botanic gardens at Inverleith (Edinburgh), Benmore (Argyll), Dawyck (Peebleshire), and Logan (Wigtownshire). Since 1990 he has been responsible for co-ordinating RBGE's conservation policy. He has traveled in Africa, China, the Himalayas, North, Central and South America in order to carry out fieldwork.

Philip Thomas has worked with the International Conifer Conservation Programme at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh since 1995. He holds a Diploma in Horticulture Edinburgh (Hons.) and has also trained in horticulture in Australia. He has undertaken field work in many temperate and subtropical parts of the world. He has been involved with the compilation of a mult-disciplinary and multi-institutional biological inventory of the Gaoligongshan, Yunnan since 1996. He has extensive experience working on Darwin Initiative conservation projects in Vietnam, Chile and Lao PDR. He is an active member of member of the IUCN Conifer Specialist Group with a particular interest in SE Asian conifers. He has recently co-authored a book on the conifers of Vietnam and is a major contributor to a National Conservation Status Review for those conifers.

Peter Wilkie holds a BSc from the University of Stirling and a MSc (An ethnobotanical investigation into some non-timber forest products of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia) from the University of Edinburgh. He joined the RBGE in 1993 and spent over two years in Indonesia as Botanical team co-ordinator on the DFID funded Indonesian Tropical Forest Management Programme. From 1995 he was heavily involved in the writing and editing of floristic accounts for the Manual of the larger and more important non dipterocarp trees of Central Kalimantan which was published in July 1997. He also held a botanical identification workshop in Indonesia for forestry department workers and logging concessionaire staff. Recent publication from this project include the limitations of vernacular names for inventory work. At present his main research interest is in the family Sterculiaceae, in particular the taxonomy of the tropical tree genus Scaphium. He has considerable field experience in Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines and has conversational Bahasa Indonesia.

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