James Peter Stanton is an Australian landscape ecologist, fire ecologist, botanist and biogeographer who individually conducted systematic environmental resource surveys throughout Queensland whilst working for the National Parks department of Forestry from 1967-1974. He carried out his assessments in a wide range of dissimilar landscapes leading to the identification and protection of many critically threatened ecosystems across the state during a period of rapid and widespread land development under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government. For this work he became the first Australian to receive the IUCN Fred M. Packard Award in 1982. In 1973 Stanton undertook a field review of the conservation status of the Wet Tropics area of Queensland spanning two reports which were published by Queensland Forestry in 1974. The reports reinforced and extended the 1966 conservation assessments of Dr. Leonard Webb and Geoff Tracey of CSIRO which had been specifically confined to the lowland areas of the region on account of the extreme development pressures which had been placed on the lowlands from around the mid-1950s onwards. Stanton's assessments confirmed that "the areas Webb and Tracey had identified were still some of the highest priorities for conservation" whilst also identifying and recommending the protection of a number of additional endangered habitats both within and beyond the lowland areas. The early conservation work conducted in the Wet Tropics by Stanton, along with that of Webb and Tracey, was instrumental to the later protection of many rare and threatened landscapes within the region, including the lowland rainforests of the Daintree and Cape Tribulation area. From 1977 to 1997 he worked as a senior scientist for the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, relocating from Brisbane to Cairns in 1979 where he remained stationed throughout his career. During this period Stanton produced a body of field research which was to significantly inform and support the listing process of the Wet Tropics of QueenslandWorld Heritage area and it’s ongoing ecological management. His conservation work in the Wet Tropics and Northern Queensland contributed to Stanton being awarded the Public Service Medal of Australia in 1996 for "outstanding public service to natural system protection and conservation planning" and the Australian Centenary Medalin 2001 for "a long and distinguished public service career contributing to conservation of the Wet Tropics". In 2001 Stanton was also the recipient of the Australian Wet Tropics Management Authority’s ‘Cassowary Award’ for his scientific work and his vegetation mapping of the region which later culminated in the publication of 38 vegetation community maps at 1:50,000 scale entitled "The Vegetation of the Wet Tropics of Queensland bioregion".The project built on previous 1:100,000 vegetation mapping providing finer and more accurate vegetation mapping accompanied by a series of reports describing the main vegetation types of each mapsheet area, their understory types, disturbance histories and their links to the geology of the sites they occupy.
