George Richardson Proctor

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George Richardson Proctor (born July 13, 1920 in Boston , Massachusetts , † October 12, 2015 in New York City , New York ) was an American botanist and fern researcher. He was one of the leading experts on the flora of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Proctor ".

Live and act

George Richardson Proctor began studying at the University of Pennsylvania after the Second World War , which he completed with a Ph.D. completed. To finance his studies he took an assistant position at the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia , where he worked from 1946 to 1947. A formative event in Proctor's career as a botanist was his participation in the Catherwood-Chaplin-West India expedition in 1948, which took him to Cuba , the Cayman Islands, San Andrés and Providencia and to Colombia . The ornithologist James Bond , with whom Proctor had a long friendship, also took part in this expedition . This experience, as well as his early influence by William Ralph Maxon (1877-1948) of the Smithsonian Institution , who published Proctor's first article in the American Fern Journal , led him to pursue his botanical studies for the rest of his life in the Caribbean.

In 1949 Proctor moved to Jamaica, where he studied the fern flora until 1951 . From 1951 to 1980 he headed the natural history department at the Institute of Jamaica, where he was responsible for setting up the herbarium. From 1982 to 1983 he was in charge of the herbarium of the Botanical Garden of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. From 1983 to 1998 he was director of the herbarium at the Puerto Rican Government's Department of Natural and Environmental Resources in San Juan . Most recently, he was a consulting botanist at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2004 . In 1978 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Florida International University .

Alongside Henri Alain Liogier (1916–2009), Richard Alden Howard (1917–2003) and Charles Dennis Adams (1920–2005), Proctor was one of the leading experts on the Caribbean plant systematics. He studied the flora on over 50 Caribbean islands and collected more than 55,000 specimens in the West Indies and in Central and South America. He also studied the historical collections of European herbaria that Hans Sloane and Olof Swartz brought together in Jamaica. Proctor's books include Flora of Barbados (1958, with Evelyn Graham Beaujon Gooding and Arthur Raymond Loveless), Flowering Plants of Jamaica (1972, with Charles Dennis Adams and Robert William Read ), Flora of the Cayman Islands (1984, revised edition 2012) , Ferns of Jamaica (1985) and Ferns of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (1989). In the 1990s, he wrote a treatise on the monocots in Puerto Rico .

In 2006, Proctor was embroiled in a scandal when his wife accused him of plotting against her. He was arrested on board an airplane in the United States and sentenced to four years in prison in February 2010. However, due to the deterioration in his health, he only spent two years and seven months in prison. Proctor was married twice. He had six children and 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

George Richardson Proctor died on October 12, 2015 at the age of 95 in New York City.

Honors and Dedication Names

Approximately 28 species of plants are named after Proctor, including the Cayman Islands' national tree, Coccothrinax proctorii , described by Robert William Read in 1980. In 1976 he was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal and Order of Merit for his dedicated work in Jamaica.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary: George Richardson Proctor, 1920–2015. In: compasscayman.com. Cayman Compass, October 30, 2015, accessed November 21, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Proctor, George Richardson
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Proctor, George R .; Proctor (author code)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American botanist and fern researcher
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts , United States
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 2015
Place of death New York City , New York , United States