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RANDOLPH R. THAMAN. Professor of Pacific Islands Biogeography at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, where he has been since 1974. He also serves as Chairman of the Fiji National Food and Nutrition Committee and was founder and Chairman (1982-1986, 19891990) of the South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology and the Environment (SPACHEE). His B.A. and M.A. in Geography are from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. His research interests include Pacific Island agriculture, agroforestry, food systems, nutrition and health, Pacific vegetation and ethnobotany, environmental management and education, and remote sensing. He has carried out field research in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Rotuma, Tonga, Nauru, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Indonesia, and China.
WILLIAM C. CLARKE has served as Professor of Geography at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, at Monash University in Melbourne, and at the University of Papua New Guinea. Prior to those appointments, he was Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific Studies, the Australian National University, and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. His B.A. in Anthropology and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography are from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Pacific agriculture and agroforestry, tropical biogeography, soil erosion, human ecology, and tourism. He has carried out field research in the Caribbean, Cape York, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Rotuma, and Vanuatu.
HARLEY I. MANNER. Professor of Geography, University of Guam, where he has been since 1985; formerly Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji. He has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. His research interests include Pacific agriculture and agroforestry, vegetation degradation and retrogression, effects of reforestation on soils and hydrology, environmental management, medicinal plants, and Pacific ethnobotany. He has carried out field research in Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Rotuma, Nauru, and several islands in Micronesia.
BRYCE G. DECKER received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1970, with a dissertation on the plant cover in and near the inhabited valleys of the Marquesas Islands. Following appointments at the University of Delaware and the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, he joined the Department of Geography at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where he presently serves. His research interests include historical geography of the Pacific Islands from a biological and ecological perspective, vegetation and flora, plant geography, Hawaii and French Polynesia, and problems of conservation and land use, with special reference to Hawaii.
IMAM ALI received his B.Ed. in 1976 from the University of the South Pacific. While serving as the Principal of a high school in Fiji, he took up postgraduate studies in Geography and received an M.A. from the University of the South Pacific with a thesis on changing patterns of land use among a community of sugar-cane farmers in Fiji. He is presently a Lecturer in Geography at the University of the South Pacific, after recently completing four years as a Ph.D. scholar in Human Geography at the Australian National University, carrying out research on changes among highland vegetable farmers in Sabah.