American botanist who worked at the University of Puerto Rico for over 30 years. Roy Orlo Woodbury was born in Montpelier, North Dakota, and grew up on a farm at Redland, Florida. His middle name honoured an uncle and his mother's Norwegian roots. Woodbury's father died when the budding naturalist was eight years old, meaning Roy and his brother had to work as soon as they could to help support the family, picking crops and grafting in nurseries. Despite the hardship, Woodbury led a distinguished school career and entered the University of Miami, receiving a degree in chemistry with biology in 1937. He then took up a position in Miami's botany department, where he remained for 21 years, reaching the rank of associate professor. He earned his master's degree from the same university in 1948, writing a thesis on mosses of Dade County, Florida. He was among the first botanists to explore the Everglades, before taking himself to Puerto Rico, where he spent the next 33 years of his life.

It was in 1955 that he was invited to join the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, where he carried out taxonomic work in the department of plant breeding, later the department of crop protection, and in the university's botanical garden, which he helped to design. The well-liked professor made copious collections on the island and around the Caribbean, adding to the university's herbarium, and in exploring the Puerto Rican wilderness he rediscovered many species that were thought to be extinct. His knowledge of Puerto Rican flora was legendary and led to much consultancy work.

After his retirement in 1980 he continued to serve as a consultant to the Puerto Rican Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, where he focused on endangered plant species, and was a member of the Commission for Flora Neotropica. With his wife, Ruth, Woodbury returned to Florida in 1988 and continued work identifying plants for the Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County and the DuPuis Reserve State Forest as well as becoming a research associate at the Fairchild Tropical Garden. He died in 2002 of skin cancer. While he was more interested in fieldwork than writing, Woodbury authored around 70 publications, including Trees of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands with Elbert Little and Frank Wadsworth.

Sources:
H.A. Liogier, 1996, "Botany and Botanists in Puerto Rico", The Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands: 41 (in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 776)
J.A. Santigo-Blay et al., 2003, "Roy Orlo Woodbury (1913-2002): an extraordinary field biologist", Caribbean Journal of Science, 39(1): 1-10.