Richard Primack

Richard Primack, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is a Professor of Biology with interests in plant ecology, conservation biology, climate change biology, citizen science, and tropical rain forests. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, Central America, the United States, and other countries.

He has served as the President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and is an Honorary Fellow of that society. He was a Distinguished Overseas Professor at the Northeast Forestry University in Harbin, China, and a Humboldt Research Awardee in Germany. He has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. For nine years he was the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Biological Conservation and the sole author of two widely used textbooks, Essentials of Conservation Biology and A Primer of Conservation Biology, for which 38 foreign language editions have been produced with local co-authors adding in examples from their own countries. He was also co-author of the book Tropical Rain Forests: An Ecological and Biogeographical Comparison.

For the past 20 years, Prof. Primack and his students and colleagues have been investigating the effects of a warming climate on the plants and birds of Massachusetts, with an emphasis on continuing the observations made 170 years ago by Henry David Thoreau in Concord. Prof. Primack has been involved in educating the public about the effects of climate change through public talks and popular writing, including the book Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods.