IVAN JOHN BASSETT (1921-2000)

Ivan John Bassett was born in Lethbridge, Alberta on 27th September 1921 but spent much of his early life at Cannington, near Toronto, Ontario. After service with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a Radar technician during the years 1941-1945 (much of which was spent at Gibraltar), he returned to Ontario and received a B.A. degree from the University of Toronto in 1948. He joined the Weed Unit of the Botany and Plant Pathology Division, Canadian Department of Agriculture (Ottawa) in 1948. His studies of Canadian weeds have taken him from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to British Columbia. His major taxonomic interests have been in the families Plantaginaceae, Chenopodiaceae, and Urticaceae wherein many weedy species are to be found. In 1964 John had an opportunity to conduct pollen morphological studies with Richard West and Harry Godwin at Cambridge University in England. His pollen morphological studies have been in such families as Caprifoliaceae, Chenopodiaceae, Tamaricaceae, Plantaginaceae, Polygonaceae, and Leguminosae (Trifolium). Studies of airborne pollen across Canada resulted in the annual publication Canadian Havens from Hay Fever and in the book An Atlas of Airborne Pollen Grains and Common Spores of Canada. He was an author of many other taxonomic monographs on important weedy plant groups.

John continued a productive career in spite of a long and hard battle with multiple sclerosis. He died at the Perley Rideau Veterans Health Centre (Ottawa) on 7th August 2000.

A list of his botanical publications may be seen at http://www.cciw.ca/eman-temp/scientists/botanists/BassettIJ.html

POSITION OPEN: CURATOR OF BOTANY, ROYAL B.C. MUSEUM, VICTORIA

Competition RB2000:8231
CDN $41,374 - 47,293
Heritage Resource Officer 4

The Royal British Columbia Museum is seeking a Botany Curator who will report to the Manager, Natural History. The Botany Curator will plan, develop and guide research and collection projects in Botany, plan and participate in public programming and interpretation through exhibit planning. Scholarly and popular writing as well as public speaking will be required.

Qualifications - M.Sc. in biology or equivalent; demonstrated knowledge and four to five years experience in angiosperm identification; demonstrated several years experience in filed collections; proven and demonstrated ability and experience in making oral and written presentations at both popular and technical levels. Prior to applying you must contact Pauline Langdon at 250-387-2428 (before Sept. 5) or Terry Lawrence at 250-387-2263 (after Sept. 5) for a complete list of duties and qualifications.
Closing location:

Personnel Services, Royal British Columbia Museum
675 Belleville Street, Victoria, B.C. V8W 9W2
Fax: 250-953-4336

Closing date: September 13, 2000

COURSE: MULTIVARIATE STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF VEGETATION DATA

We would like to announce a course on multivariate statistical analysis, explained in the context of community and population-level ecology. We will run it in January 2001, as in the previous two years [see BEN 201], but otherwise there are some important changes from the previous years. You can read more about it on the dedicated WWW pages at: http://regent.bf.jcu.cz/

The course capacity is limited to 18 seats, but some are already booked.

Petr Smilauer & Jan Leps
University of South Bohemia
CZ-370 05 Ceske Budejovice
Czech Republic