Our next meeting:

Tuesday April 21st 2015

JJ’s Bistro

3447 Waialae Avenue in Kaimuki (between 9th and 10th Avenues)

Social/dinner hour from 6 pm: talk starts 7 pm

Everybody welcome: no admission charge

Note that JJs is BYOB, but Tamura’s liquor store is right across the street.
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Tom Ranker

Chair, UH-Manoa Botany Department

 

Plants and People of Vanuatu

Understanding biodiversity and culture in a remote archipelago

 

Tom will talk about an ongoing project to document and study the flora of the island nation of Vanuatu and how the ni-Vanuatu people use plants in their everyday lives. The project is the most intense study of the entire flora of Vanuatu, which has one of the least well studied floras in the Pacific.

 

Tom was a professor and curator at the University of Colorado at Boulder for 18 years before joining the UH Manoa Department of Botany in 2008 as professor and chair. In 2012-2013 he served as a program director in systematic biology and biodiversity science at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA.