Timothy Waters
c/o 8 Woodberry Crescent
London
N10 1PH
United Kingdom
timwaters@fastmail.fm
I’m studying for a D.Phil. on the systematics of Agathis in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, supervised by Stephen Harris in Oxford and by Aljos Farjon at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I currently work in London, where I have a day job in local government.
I was educated in various second-hand bookshops in central London, and at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where I read Biological Sciences. As an undergraduate, I led an Oxford University Expedition to New Caledonia, and fell in love with New Caledonia’s extraordinary flora, including the 18 endemic species of Araucariaceae. In June 2001 I stayed on to do a doctorate in conifer taxonomy.
Agathis Salisb., distributed in tropical and subtropical forest from the Isthmus of Kra right across Malaysia and Indonesia, through New Guinea and Queensland to Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and New Zealand, is a particularly challenging genus to work on. Most herbarium specimens are sterile, the nomenclature is famously confused, there is very little morphological variation between species and next to nothing is known about the phylogeny of the genus.
Species delimitation is a particular difficulty, as many morphological characters do not show clear discontinuities from one species to another. I am exploring the uses of molecular data for species delimitation and hope to collect many new specimens, which will enable delimitations to be made on an objective and repeatable basis using the published algorithmic implementations such as population aggregation analysis (both PAA1 and PAA2) and cladistic haplotype analysis (CHA).
I would be very interested to hear from anyone else working on Agathis, or interested in collaborating on fieldwork in the southwest Pacific - contact details are as left.