Sir Ghillean Prance was for eleven years Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, until his retirement in 1999. Prior to this he was Senior Vice President for Science of the New York Botanical Gardens and Founding Director of the Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. He is an expert on the flora of the Amazon rain forests, having led annual expeditions there over a period of twenty-five years and described more than 450 Amazonian plants new to science.
Sir Ghillean was trained as a plant taxonomist and spent over 8 years on fieldwork and botanical exploration in Amazonian Brazil. He has a world-wide interest in the sustainable development of rainforest ecosystems and conservation generally; as well as being author of 19 books and editor of a further 14 books, he has published over 400 papers of both scientific and general interest on plant systematics, plant ecology, ethnobotany and conservation. He is presently also Chair of A Rocha International.