Greetings!

This spring I'm going to Malaysia on a Fulbright Scholarship. I'll be there for about six months, visiting several institutions including the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre near Kuching (on Borneo) and also the Forestry Research Centre in Sandakan (in Sabah). Later I'll also be spending time at the Rimba Ilmu at the University of Malaysia and at the world-renowned Forestry Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM) in Kuala Lumpur.

I'm going as a kind of participant/observer to get a hands-on experience of tropical botany and herbarium management, doing a little bit of everything from field collecting to joining ethno-botanical field-trips to good old herbarium-based plant taxonomy scopework. I'll also be offering a couple of short courses (including one on the flora of the southwestern US, based on my studies and work in Arizona).

Why Malaysia? This tropical southeastern nation has some of the oldest and most species-rich rainforests on earth and has recently shown a real interest in environmental management and eco-tourism. If you are interested in plants, check in here every so often to check out what's new!