Dutch botanist and authority on tropical forests. Roelof Oldeman is Professor Emeritus at Wageningen Agricultural University (since 2002) and its former Chair of Silviculture and Forest Ecology. He is best known (with F. Hallé) for developing the concept of tree architecture and forest structure dynamics. Oldeman and Hallé both showed that all trees conform, at least while young, to one of 23 architectural models, each named for a botanist and defined by some combination of growth characters (trunk formation, branching pattern, position of flowers, rhythmic versus constant growth etc). They worked together on their theory in the 1970s, carrying out fieldwork in the tropics (French Guiana), where the greatest diversity of tree forms occurs. The models have been employed to help derive volumes of timber from satellite imaging. Oldeman's Tropical Trees and Forests: An Architectural Analysis (1978), co-authored with Hallé and Barry Tomlinson, is a heavily cited text in tropical botany. He is also the author of Elements of Sylvology (1990) and co-author of Struggle of Life, or the natural history of stress and adaptation (1998).

In 1989 Oldeman co-founded the Canopy Foundation (Stichting Het Kronendak) and invented the term 'canopy farming' for cultivating canopy products while leaving the forest virtually intact to sustainably harvest rainforest products. The idea has been used, for example, to produce marketable ornamental orchids in situ.

Sources:
P.B. Tomlinson, 1983, "Tree Architecture", American Scientist, 71: 141-149
Stichting Het Kronendak:
http://www.treemail.nl/kronendak, accessed 13 December 2011.