The Trustees of the National Tropical Botanical Garden and the John C. Gifford Arboretum of the University of Miami are honoring Dr. Peter Ashton as the tenth recipient of the David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration.
Dr. Ashton is being recognized internationally for his contributions to our knowledge of tropical forests in the fields of ecology, floristics, systematics and conservation biology. His understanding of the biology of tropical forests is based on his own extensive field work, primarily in South-East Asia, together with other ecologists in many countries where he has served as a consultant in several applied fields.
He began his tropical career while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, U.K. on an expedition to the lower Amazon. On completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge he was successively Forest Botanist to the Governments of Brunei and Sarawak over a period of nine years. In 1966, he moved to Aberdeen University, Scotland where he founded the Institute of South-East Asia Botany, continuing his research in tropical forestry and systematics with the advantage of being able to train Asian students in an academic environment.
In 1978, he came to the United States as Director of the Arnold Arboretum and Arnold Professor of Botany at Harvard University, where he applied his energies to the management problems of a major Botanic Garden while continuing to strengthen his ties to tropical ecology. His Ph.D. students have, in turn, extended his vision in several directions.
On relinquishing this position he assumed the Bullard Professor of Forestry at Harvard within the Department of Organic and Evolutionary Biology, from which he retired in 2005. He was a co-founder of the Center for Tropical Forest Sciences in association with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which has been instrumental in establishing and sustaining several permanent forest plots in the tropics where tree populations are being minutely censused over the long term. He is an authority on the commercially important tropical family Dipterocarpaceve, a prime source of timber, and has contributed to several tropical floras.
The international scope and importance of these activities in the field of tropical ecology and his contributions to the theory of speciation were recognized in 2007 by the award of the prestigious Japan Prize.
