British botanist, born in London, Jonathan Timberlake has until recently spent most of his professional life in eastern and southern Africa. Although he has a particular interest in African acacias, most of his collections, which are often accompanied by ecological and soil notes, have been general in the course of vegetation and range survey work. Those from Kenya are mostly ethnobotanical collections from the Pokot, north of Lake Baringo. He has also collected in the Okavango, South-East District, Tuli Block, and south-west Kalahari in Botswana; in Cabo Delgado, the Niassa Game Reserve, Zambezi Delta/Marromeu, Gorongosa, Limpopo Valley, Umbeluzi, and Bela Vista in Mozambique; and all over Zimbabwe.
After graduating from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, he moved to Kenya to work as a primary school teacher. He started collecting, in 1976, on Andrew Agnew's research expedition to the uplands of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya, and undertook ethnobotanical work on Jean Brown's anthropological expedition to the pastoral Pokot tribe in northern Kenya. He then worked, from 1978 until 1981, as a UN Volunteer in the Range Ecology Section of the Ministry of Agriculture in Gaborone, Botswana. There, in addition to carrying out ad hoc range surveys and writing a field guide to Botswana's acacias, he made a vegetation survey of 70,000 km of southeastern Botswana, which earned him an external MSc in 1984 from his alma mater. After Botswana, he continued his work as a UN volunteer in the Palau Islands, in the Western Pacific, on an FAO project to introduce cattle to the islands. In 1983 he was transferred to Maputo, Mozambique, as an FAO expert in rangeland and livestock evaluation. Over the next few years he produced vegetation surveys of parts of the Cabo Delgado Province in the north, of the Chokwe area along the Limpopo River in the south, and of the Salamanga/ Tinonganine and Changalane areas.
In 1988 he was appointed by the National Herbarium in Harare, Zimbabwe, to survey the vegetation on communal lands in the northern and western parts of the country and to investigate areas of interest for plant conservation. Later he joined British Aid, as a Forest Ecologist with the Zimbabwe Forestry Commission, working in the moist forests in the eastern part of the country, especially Chirinda and the Haroni/Rusitu regions, and in the Kalahari sands woodlands in western Matabeleland. From 1994 until 2005, he was a self-employed consultant, primarily for the Biodiversity Foundation for Africa. His consultancy work was mostly botanical and included vegetation surveys in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and Ethiopia. During this period he co-authored a field guide to Zimbabwe's acacias and other publications on Acacia, Colophospermum mopane, rooting strategies and the biodiversity of the Zambezi Basin Wetlands.
In 2005 he relocated to London to take over as editor of the Flora Zambesiaca at Kew. From there he also runs a Darwin Initiative project concerned with conserving the biodiversity of some montane massifs in northern Mozambique and with botanical and conservation capacity building. He continues to be active on the Roster of Experts of the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
