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.

--
LID