Xuefei Yang Editor

Dr A B (Tony) Cunningham works with People and Plants International (PPI), is a Senior Associate at CIFOR and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia. He is an ethnoecologist/applied ecologist who has focussed on the interface between local livelihoods, sustainable natural resource use and conservation. He has written many peer reviewed publications, including the book 'Applied ethnobotany: people, wild plant use and conservation' (Earthscan, 2001) and has been the recipient of several awards, including the Sir Peter Scott Conservation award (1999) from IUCN and the E K Janakki medal (2003) for services to the field of ethnobotany.

Dr Xuefei Yang did her first MSc on forests and land-use changes in Yunnan, China (2001) and then worked extensively on matsutake mushrooms, firstly for an MSc through the Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation at Enschede in The Netherlands (2004) and later for her PhD through the Kunming Institite of Botany, Chinese Academy of Science (2005). She is currently the Scientific coordinator for the Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) Experiment in China (www.bef-china.de), jointly funded by German Research Foundation (DFG) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). In 2007, she received the 'Alice Murphy' Award from the International Society for Tropical Ecology during the 2007 Tropical Ecology Congress in Dehra Dun, India.