Brazilian botanist. João Murça Pires was considered by many botanists of his generation as their foremost authority on the flora of Amazonia. He was born in Bariri in the state of São Paulo and studied agronomy at the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luis de Queirόs, a branch of the University of São Paulo. After graduating in 1942, he was offered a job with a babassu oil company in Kelhru, a small village in Maranhão. He took a brief training course in a chemistry laboratory in São Paulo to learn about the distillation process and then travelled north to the Amazon region, where he remained, apart from a few trips abroad and two secondments in Brasilia, for the rest of his life.

When Indústrias Babassú Ltda failed after only a year, he was hired by the local agricultural extension service, but eventually went in search of more rewarding work in Belém. In April 1945 he was appointed by the Instituto Agronômico do Norte (IAN), a new research unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, to establish a botanical section and herbarium (with the help of American botanist William Andrew Archer, who was seconded to IAN from the United States Department of Agriculture in Beltsville). Pires would head the botany section of IAN for the next thirty years, until his retirement in 1975, including a brief period as director of IAN and of the Amazonian Agronomy School in Belém.

From 1963 to 1965 and from 1969 to 1970, he was reassigned to set up a botany department at the recently founded University of Brasilia. He left the university with a herbarium of over 60,000 specimens, primarily from collections made on the Planalto do Brasil expeditions (1964-1975), which he organised in collaboration with Howard S. Irwin of the New York Botanical Garden. He also helped to plan, and contributed many duplicates to, the herbarium of the Centro de Pesquisa da Lavoura Cacaueira (CEPLAC) in Itabuna, Bahia, and after he retired was responsible for reorganising the botany department at Museu Goeldi, in Belém, whose herbarium now bears his name. In 1983 he submitted a thesis to his alma mater in São Paulo and was awarded a PhD in botany. His retirement years, however, were lived in virtual poverty because of an inadequate pension. Despite the difficulty of his situation, which was periodically relieved by grant support, he continued with his botanical work until his death in 1994. A long stay at the New York Botanical Garden between 1985 and 1988 was, he told his friends, the most tranquil period of his life.

During his early days in the Amazon, Pires was mentored by the Swiss botanist Adolpho Ducke. He in turn had a strong interest in passing on his knowledge of the Amazon flora and was a supervisor to many young botanists and a frequent lecturer in botany at the University of Brasilia and the agricultural college of Belém. His botanical explorations took advantage of newly built roads into the jungle, which brought him into some of the most undisturbed parts of the region. As well as assisting many foreign botanists in their field work, he participated in the Planalto do Brasil expeditions (1964-1975) and on a large number of field trips of the Brazilian RADAM, radar survey. Although short, his list of 34 publications testifies to his vast knowledge of the Amazonian vegetation. Pires was awarded the Dom João VI Medal from the Rio de Janeiro Botanical garden and Frederico Meneses Veiga award from EMBRAPA, and was a fellow of the Linnean Society of London and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Sources:
G.T. Prance, 1995, "João Murça Pires (1917-1994)", Taxon, 44(4): 653-655.