John Parrotta, Ph.D., is a forest scientist engaged in research for over 40 years, in Puerto Rico, Brazil, India and other countries worldwide. His areas of interest and expertise include tropical forest ecology, biodiversity conservation, ecology and management of planted forests, forest landscape restoration, forest history, and traditional forest-related knowledge. He is the author of nearly 200 scientific publications, including two books in the fields of traditional forest knowledge and medicinal plants, Healing Plants of Peninsular India (CABI: 2001), and Traditional Forest Knowledge: Sustaining Communities, Ecosystems and Biocultural Diversity (Springer: 2012).
He holds a B.A. in Biology and B.S. in Chemistry from Merrimack College (in Massachusetts, USA), an M.Sc. in Ecology from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK), and a Ph.D. from Yale University. A career scientist and national research program leader for international science issues with the USDA Fores