🚀 go-pugleaf

Botanists (especially rainforest botanists) and conservationists will 
be saddened to learn that Jeff Tracey died overnight aged 73 at his 
home on the Atherton Tableland, inland of the tourist ghetto of Cairns 
in Far North Queensland.

Jeff was the other half of the renowned "Webb and Tracey" 
Australian rainforest taxonomy team of the past 4 or 5 decades.  Jeff 
joined up with Len as his assistant and became as well known in his 
own right.

One of the very few people who could confidently identify our 
[Australian tropical] rainforest species at the seedling stage, Jeff 
went on to be a leading light in "retirement" in local efforts to 
regenerate the "scrub" on degraded land on the Tableland in 
association with groups such as TREAT (TREas for the Atherton 
Tableland -- if I've got that acronym correctly decoded) and was also 
pushing for a National Botanic Garden to be established at Mareeba, 
featuring trees of the softwood scrubs and other dry tropics 
ecosystems.

My own association with Webb and Tracey goes back just over 40 years 
when they provided unchallengeable authority for the ID of 
rainforest seed samples I was counting chromosomes in as a UQ 
undergrad project.

And -- a small digression -- a mate was telling me this evening while 
we were mourning Jeff's passing, that that other old bloke of the FNQ 
rainforest, Joe Connell from the Univ. of California, is due back in 
Oz shortly for yet another of his annual visits to his research plots 
here.  My mate helped tag seedlings in these plots 40 years ago -- and 
they're *still* seedlings!

Forty years sees the passing of time and people, but it's just a yawn 
in the undisturbed scrub.

Cheers, Phred.

-- 
ppnerkDELETE@THISyahoo.com.INVALID