CURRICULUM VITAE OF BRYAN KENNETH SIMON
Date of Birth: 14 April 1943
Place of Birth: Witbank, South Africa
Nationality: Australian
Marital Status: Married Pamela Nan Nicol 19/12/70
DoB of Children: Douglas Norman 28/2/74, Patrick James 23/6/76, David Alexander 14/10/80, Mary-Anne Joy Louise 13/12/82, Caroline Elizabeth Margaret 23/4/86
Emails Bryan.Simon@science.dsitia.qld.gov.au bksimon43@gmail.com
PROFESSIONAL DETAILS
Designation: Research Associate, Queensland Herbarium
Education: Milton High School, Bulawayo, 1956-1961
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, B.Sc. (Lond.), 1962-1964
University of Reading, M.Sc. (Plant Taxonomy), 1970-1971
Work History: National Herbarium of Rhodesia
Systematic Botanist Feb.1965-May 1974
1. Overview of Botanical Career
Interest in grasses was stimulated in the Bulawayo and Matopos area of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as a Boy Scout, in the process of collecting 20 grasses for a Collectors Badge, part of the requirements for the Queens Scout Award; I soon realised my fascination with these plants did not stop at 20. My examiner for this badge was J.M.Rattray (author of The Grass Cover of Africa (1960)) based at the Matopos Research Station, south of Bulawayo. The interest in grasses was further enhanced as a schoolboy member of the Matabeleland Branch of the Rhodesian Schools Exploration Society's 1961 expedition to Buffalo Bend on the Nuanetsi River in the south east part of Rhodesia, presently part of the Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe. I was a member of the botany section, led by R.B.Drummond from the National Herbarium in Salisbury (Harare). This society created an awareness of natural sciences for a number of future biologists and I assisted in the leading of the botanical sections of two further expeditions to other remote regions of the country (Charama Plateau 1965 and Mt. Bukwa 1971).
My professional career of 47 years has been almost entirely dedicated to the study of the Poaceae. My first nine years (1965-1974) were spent in the position of Systematic Botanist at the National Herbarium of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), after graduating with a B.Sc. (Lond.) in Botany and Zoology from the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe), while on a scholarship from the Tobacco Research Board of Rhodesia. The herbarium had a rich grass collection from the Flora Zambesiaca countries due to the good curation and collections by previous agrostologists K.E. Bennett (née Sturgeon), J.B.Phipps and L.K.A. Crook (née Chippindall) under the direction of Dr. (later Professor) Hiram Wild.
As the national agrostologist I specialised in the taxonomic research of the grasses of the Flora Zambesiaca area (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Mozambique). During this time I compiled a definitive check-list of the grasses of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Zambia, undertook extensive field work in three FZ countries (Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi) and published a taxonomic revision of the genus Sacciolepis for the FZ area. Duplicates of herbarium specimens were sent mainly to K, BM and PRE and 256 of them, some types of new species, have been cited in the Flora Zambesiaca grass volumes published from 1971-1999. In 1968 I visited Kew for three months to further my research and in 1970-71 I undertook a M.Sc. degree in Plant Taxonomy at the University of Reading (under Prof. Vernon Heywood), in association with Kew. While at Kew I had a close working relationship with the agrostologists Derek Clayton, Steve Renvoize, Charles Hubbard and Norman Bor and at the Natural History Museum with Edmund Launert. In 1972 I presented taxomony lectures to the M.Sc. Tropical Resource Ecology course at the University of Rhodesia (now UZ) on my return to Africa.
In 1974, after the death of Dr S.T. Blake, I applied for and was successful in acquiring the position of grass taxonomist at the Queensland Herbarium. In an attempt to familiarise myself with Australian grasses I made contact with the Australian agrostologists Surrey Jacobs (NSW) and Mike Lazarides (CANB) and published a preliminary checklist of Australian grasses in 1978, the first national census of the family since 1882. This was followed by other publications of national and state significance (including Key to Queensland Grasses (1980, 1987), A Key to Australian Grasses (three editions 1990, 1993, 2002), an account of Australian grass genera in Morley and Toelken’s Flowering Plants in Australia (1983), accounts of 23 genera of the Flora of the Kimberley (1992), Key to Genera of Australian Grasses in Flora of Australia 43 (2002) and AusGrass (2002), a co-authored CD on Australian grasses that incorporates an interactive key and information system that has been referred to as the largest and most comprehensive account of any plant group published in this format.
I have also published taxonomic revisions of large and difficult genera in Africa (Sacciolepis 1981) and Australia (Aristida 1991 and Sporobolus 1999) - and the Flora of Australia accounts of the latter two genera (2005). I am currently working on the 93 genera of the tribes Andropogoneae and Paniceae for future grass volumes of the Flora of Australia. I have resolved a large number of taxonomic and nomenclatural problems in the grass family (see Publications).
I have attended all the major International Symposia on Grasses - Washington, DC (1986), Sydney (1998), Claremont (2003), Copenhagen (2008) and three International Botanic Congresses - Sydney (1982), St Louis (1999) and Melbourne (2011) and have been involved in an official capacity at most of these meetings, either as a presenter or an organiser. I have also attended other international meetings in Munich, Manchester, Pretoria, London, Yogyakarta, Canberra, San Antonio, Leiden and Bariloche and presented at some of them.
I currently having good working relationship with many agrostologists internationally - in the US with Travis Columbus, Gerrit Davidse, Toby Kellogg, Mary Barkworth, Lynn Clark, Paul Peterson, Rob Soreng and Neil Snow, in Canada with Lynn Gillespie and Jeff Saarela, in Mexico with Gabriel Sanchez-Ken, in Argentina with Fernando Zuloaga, in UK (Kew) with Derek Clayton, Tom Cope, Sylvia Phillips, Steve Renvoize and Maria Vorontsova, in Australia with Terry Macfarlane, Neville Walsh, John Thompson and Trevor Clifford, in New Zealand with Henry Connor, in South Africa with Lyn Fish and Nigel Barker, in the Netherlands with JeF Veldkamp and in Switzerland with Peter Linder.
I have a good understanding of the DELTA sytem for coding taxonomic data and in this regard I have had collaboration with Mike Dallwitz, Les Watson and Robert Webster. I also understand the basics of the Lucid software, which was used for the presentation of the AusGrass CD with Donovan Sharp, following transition of the data from a DELTA editor. The Scratchpad sites GrassWorld and AusGrass2, hosted at the Natural History Museum, London have been built up from DELTA databases through the encouragement of Keehan Harman in the early stages and constant assistance from Irina Brake. The very tedious work of coding the data into DELTA and subsequent entry to the Scratchpads has been done and continues to be entered by Yucely Alfonso and Daniel Healy. The foreign language character sets and descriptions of GrassWorld could not have been assembled without the extremely generous assistance of Philip Sharp and Hildemar Scholz (German), Philippe Morat (French) and Gilberto Ocampo (Spanish).
2. Research Achievements
My research career as a taxonomist has necessitated that I have a working knowledge of the literature of the grass family. To this end I have complied an extensive Endnote bibliography of the Poaceae and general theoretical taxonomic and phylogenetic literature (included in the GrassWorld Scratchpad).
I have consulted some of the older literature on the grasses relevant to my work at other botanical institutions with larger and older holdings than the Queensland Herbarium library, in particular the libraries at Kew, the Natural History Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution.
I have worked in the herbarium environment for almost 47 years, with almost 10 years at the National Herbarium
of Zimbabwe (SRGH) and 37 years at the Queensland Herbarium (BRI). During this time I have also had experience at other herbaria during working visits. These include many visits to Kew and the Natural History Museum while studying for a M.Sc. at the University of Reading and on separate occasions since then. I have examined type specimens at the Linnean Herbarium (LINN) in London on a couple of occasions.
During my working life in Africa I undertook working visits to the Botanical Research Institute, Pretoria (PRE), the Botany Dept of the University of Cape Town (BOL), and several smaller herbaria in Zambia and Zimbabwe. In the U.S. I have worked at the herbarium and library of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Gardens (RSA), the Missouri Botanical Gardens (MO) on four occasions, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC (US) on three visits and had one visit to the herbarium of the New York Botanic Gardens (NY). In Europe I have had brief visits to 6 of the most noteworthy botanical institutions in Paris (P), Leiden (L), Berlin (B), Munich (M), Geneva (G) and Vienna (W)
In Australia I have had working visits to the Australian National Herbarium (CANB), the Research School of Biological Sciences at the ANU and all the main State herbaria (NSW, MEL, HO, AD, DNA, NT and PERTH) as well as smaller regional herbaria (UNE, Beauglehole herbarium (Portland), Kunanurra, Carnarvon, MBA and CNS). In New Zealand I visited the Allan Herbarium, Lincoln (CHR) during field work in the South Island while collecting species of the Danthonioideae with Mike Pirie and Aelys Humphreys (from Z at the time). In Asia I have visited herbaria at the Singapore Botanical Gardens (SING) on two occasions and the herbarium of the Bogor Botanical Gardens (BO) in Indonesia. In all these institutions the reasons for my visits varied from general interest to locating type material and literature on the grass family.
I have researched and published revisions of two of the most difficult grass genera in Australia, Aristida and Sporobolus. This involved considerable effort in teasing out the morphological variation of both groups and the subsequent publication of many new species (15 in Aristida and 4 in Sporobolus). Sporobolus includes the weedy Rats Tail Grasses of the Sporobolus indicus complex and I have had input to meetings and committees in relation the taxonomy of this group of weedy grasses that are a current great focus of concern to the pastoral industry.
I have also published on many other taxa of Poaceae (see Publication list), with publication of almost 80 new species and infra-specific taxa as well as five new genera. I am currently working on the Flora of Australia accounts the large tropical subfamily Panicoideae, which includes the tribes Paniceae and Andropogoneae.
The CD AusGrass – Grasses of Australia (D. Sharp and B.K.Simon, 2002) was well received by the botanical and general community (see review in Taxon 52: 398-400(2003)). It represented the culmination of three years intensive and collaborative work with Donovan Sharp on the IT and presentation side of the CD and myself on the taxonomic and content side, including preparation of descriptions of genera and species using a natural language module of the DELTA package of computer automation and an update (3rd edition) of the Key to Australian Grasses.
Fieldwork and grass photography has taken me to many countries (all states of Australia, six countries in southern Africa, Hawaii, Mexico, USA, Canada, Indonesia, South Korea, New Zealand and Argentina) and my collections are cited in the botanical literature of Africa (in particular the 4 grass volumes of the Flora Zambesiaca) and Australia (revisions of Eriachne, Triodia, Eragrostis by Lazarides; my revisions of Aristida, Sporobolus and revisionary work on Paniceae and Andropogoneae in Austrobaileya) with many of these being type specimens.
While the bulk of my taxonomic work has been based on morphological data and traditional taxonomic methods I am well aware of modern phylogenetic methods of investigation and have a basic understanding of cladistic software programs. Moreover I also have a good appreciation of the use of molecular data in the widely used phylogenetic investigations as they apply to grass classification. I have presented a poster on the conflict of morphological and molecular data as it applies to grass phylogeny and classification at conferences at the University of Vienna in 2001 and at the Monocots 3 Symposium in Ontario, California, 2003. A paper on this subject was published in the proceedings of this conference (2007).
Queensland Herbarium
Botanist Div. I ‑ 18.6.1974
Senior Botanist ‑ 1.9.1978
Principal Botanist I-13 (PO5) - 3.4.1990
Senior Principal Botanist 1992
Principal Botanist 2005
Research Associate 2012
University of Queensland
Senior Fellow, QAAFI 2012
Queensland University of Technology
Research Associate 2012
Overview of Botanical Career
Achievements in Research
Current and proposed research programs
Presentations of seminars and attendance at
conferences, workshops and symposia
Professional Societies
Field Work
Publications