My friend and former colleague David Edwards, who has died aged 77, was a botanist, lecturer and then senior administrator at Universiti Brunei Darussalam in Brunei, where he made a great contribution to efforts to preserve the tropical rainforest.
In 1990 he became involved in leading, with the Earl of Cranbrook, the Brunei Rainforest Project, a joint venture between the university and the Royal Geographical Society, which, among other things, led to the establishment of the Kuala Belalong field studies centre in the pristine primary rainforest of the Brunei interior
He also helped establish permanent tropical forest plots in Brunei in the early 1990s that are all-important today in evaluating the effects of changing climate.
As president of the Brunei Nature Society for 24 years, David also promoted local community participation in the conservation of the country’s rich biodiversity. In partnership with government officers, he defined boundaries for large scale protected forest areas under the Heart of Borneo Initiative, a WWF-supported tri-national 2007 declaration that seeks to protect one of the largest remaining transboundary rainforests in the world, including a massive area inhabited by the forest-dwelling Dayak people.
Born in Bristol, David was the son Anthony Edwards, a GP, and Margaret (nee Lamb), an anaesthetist. He attended Clifton college in the city in the 1960s and made botanical forays over the fence of the cliff top edge of the Avon Gorge to check out rare and endangered plants such as Bristol Rock-cress.
After gaining a degree in botany at Cardiff University he stayed on for a PhD studying land colonisation by early plants of the Devonian period.
He then spent 11 years as a botany lecturer and researcher at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. There he met Alice Dzakpasu, a fellow teacher, whom he married in 1981, before arriving in Brunei in the mid-80s to help set up Universiti Brunei Darussalam’s new biology department.
At the university, where I also worked, he eventually became dean of science and a senior academic adviser, in which roles he helped to expand the institution’s facilities, including an entirely new medicine faculty. He was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Sultan of Brunei in 2005.
David left a lasting legacy in terms of tropical forest education, research and conservation.
He is survived by Alice, their children, Awo, Robert and Susan, three grandchildren and his sister, Caroline.
