Mark W Chase Editor

Alec M. Pridgeon is Sainsbury Orchid Fellow of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and Chairman of the International Orchid Committee. In orchid circles he is perhaps best known as past Editor of the American Orchid Society Bulletin (now titled Orchids) and Founding Editor of the scientific orchid journal, Lindleyana. He has written or co-written 60 scientific articles or book chapters and 100 popular articles, co-written and co-directed five videotapes, edited 12 books including the Proceedings of the 14th World Orchid Conference and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Orchids, and compiled the Orchid Action Plan for the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN in Geneva. Phillip Cribb is retired as Deputy Keeper of the Herbarium and Curator of the Orchid Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He has specialized in the taxonomy of Old World tropical orchids, participating in many expeditions to study orchids in the field. He is the author of several books and over 350 papers on orchids. He has been a member of the Royal Horticultural Society's Orchid Committee for 30 years, an member of the International Orchid Committee, and until 2006 chaired the IUCN/ Species Survival Commission's Orchid Specialist Group, which publishes Orchid Conservation News. He has been awarded the Linnean Society Gold Medal for Botany, the Royal Horticultural Society's Westonbirt Medal and Veitch Memorial Medal, the Orchid Society of South-east Asia's Gold Medal, and the American Orchid Society's Gold Medal of Achievement for his work on orchids. Mark W. Chase is Director of the Jodrell Laboratory at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He has received the Rolf Dalhgren Prize from by the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund (Sweden) and the Linnean Medal for Botany and the Darwin/Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society of London; he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1995 and Royal Society of London in 2003. He holds an honorary doctorate from the universities of Uppsala (Sweden) and Ghent (Belgium) and is member of the Orchid Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society. Finn N. Rasmussen is retired Associate Professor and researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and at the Department of Biology, research group for evolutionary botany, University of Copenhagen.