CONTRIBUTOR:

Joanne M. Sharpe

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Sharplex Services

BIOGRAPHY:

Joanne M. Sharpe is an independent Consultant specializing in long-term studies of fern ecology. She lives in Maine (USA) but has been a Research Associate with the NSF-funded Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program in Puerto Rico for over twenty years. She has published and is currently writing up the results of a several long-term studies fern growth and spore production as part of tropical forest (and mangrove) productivity, hurricane impact, and demographic projects. Joanne has degrees in English (BA--University of Houston), Regional Planning (MRP--University of Massachusetts and Botany (PhD--University of Georgia). After a 15-year career in computers, Joanne discovered tropical ferns during an ecological seminar at the Asa Wright Center in Trinidad and proceeded to graduate school where she did doctoral research in Costa Rica and published four papers on the demography, tropic responses and vegetative reproduction of a rain forest floor fern, Danaea wendlandii. She spent 17 years maintaining the membership data base and producing the Annual Review of Pteridological Research for the International Association of Pteridologists. Joanne was also a co-editor of the text book Fern Ecology and co-author of several of the book's chapters.