John Stanley Beard

John Stanley Beard (1916-) is a British-born forester and ecologist who now resides 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

In 1988 a painting of John Beard by artist Fred Cress won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most famous portrait prize.

He received an OAM in 2003. [ 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 ]

Notes

References

* Beard, J.S. 1944. "Climax vegetation of tropical America." "Ecology" 25:127–158
* Beard, J.S. 1955. "The classification of Tropical American vegetation-types." "Ecology" 36:89–100
* 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,

See also

* Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia
* Ecoregions in Australia