This collection of writings by colleagues honors Bassett Maguire (1904-1991), a tireless scholar, botanical explorer, and pioneer in calling for an inventory of the world's tropical vegetation and the development of land-use policies that take into account the interrelationship of the bioecosystems of the tropics. His early work while a professor at Utah State University included developing the Intermountain Herbairum, which began an extensive collection of the developing flora of that region. Much of his later work, while a curator at The New York Botanical Garden, was in the vast Guyana Highlands of northern South America, where he braved remote jungles, sandstone mountains, and barrelling rivers to document and collect hundreds of thousands of botanical specimens.
