Geoff Tracey


John Geoffrey Tracey was an Australian ecologist and botanist whose pioneering research work in partnership with Dr. Leonard Webb within the Rainforest Ecology Unit of the CSIRO in the 1950's led to the publication of the first systematic classification of Australian rainforest vegetation in the Journal of Ecology in 1959. By the early 80's, after decades of ongoing research, Tracey and Webb had accumulated a significant corpus of scientific evidence in support of the theory that Australian tropical rainforests had evolved in Gondwana over 100 million years ago and were not, as previously believed, relatively recent arrivals from South East Asia. This evidence, in combination with Tracey and Webb's 1975 publication of a collection of 15 vegetation maps entitled "Vegetation of the Humid Tropical Region of North Queensland", and Tracey's 1982 paper "The Vegetation of the Humid Tropical Region of North Queensland", helped to establish the scientific basis for a number of major conservation campaigns across Queensland and paved the way for the subsequent successful World Heritage nomination of the Wet Tropics of Queensland by Aila Keto in 1988.
In 1982 Tracey and botanist Joan Wright in collaboration with Peter Stanton, then Regional Director of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, established TREAT, a community-based rainforest nursery and tree planting organisation with the aim of revegetating degraded lands in order to create corridors for wildlife in Far North Queensland. For this work Tracey was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia in the 1996 Australian Honours ceremony "For service to conservation and the environment, particularly tropical forest maintenance and planting in North Queensland, through the organisation Trees for the Evelyn and Atherton Tablelands "