Images for great plant hunters story
27 January 2012
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Examples and images for the story 'Half of species found by ‘great plant hunters’'
John Wood collecting plants in El Palmar, Chuquisaca, Bolivia holding a specimen of a possible new species of Ipomoea (sweet potato) the focus of a current research project at Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences. John Wood, a current Research Associate at Oxford University, has collected more than 28, 000 plant specimens from Somalia, Yemen, Bhutan, Colombia and Bolivia, resulting in excess of 100 new species in a large number of families. Photo: courtesy of Darwin Initiative. A larger version of this image is available here.
Julian A Steyermark (1909-1988), a native of St Louis, USA, collecting on top of Cerro Jaua, in the state of Bolívar, Venezuela, in 1974, accompanied by a local Indian assistant. Steyermark made more than 138,000 collections of plants, described 3,157 plant taxa, and more than 300 species were named in his honour. Photo: Missouri Botanical Garden. A larger version of this image is available here.
Ghillean Prance collecting Genipa americana in Amazonas, Brazil. Sir Ghillean Prance, a former Director of Kew Gardens and graduate student of Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, has collected 32,918 plant specimens with a minimum of 350 new species resulting from those collections. 49 species and one genus have been named in his honour. Photo: Prance. A larger version of this image is available here.
Specimens from 30 species of Strobilanthes (Acanthaceae) described by John Wood and Robert Scotland between 1994 and 2010. 40% of these specimens (top two rows) were collected by Frank Kingdon-Ward (F K-W), a Big Hitter focussed on the Himalayas. First two specimens on left hand side of top row are the types of Strobilanthes kingdonii and Strobilanthes wardiana, both named after F K-W in recognition of his enormous contribution to plant collecting. Photo: Oxford University. A larger version of this image is available here.
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