Soejatmi Dransfield facts for kids

Soejatmi Dransfield (born in 1939) is a British plant scientist from Indonesia. She is an expert in identifying and classifying bamboo plants. She works as a special research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the UK.

Early Life and Education

Soejatmi Soenarko was born in Nganjuk Regency, Indonesia, in 1939. She studied Plant taxonomy at the Academy of Agriculture in Ciawi, Bogor Regency, Indonesia. This is where she earned her first degree.

Later, in 1975, she earned her PhD in biology from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Her special research for her PhD was about a type of grass called Cymbopogon.

Career in Botany

Dransfield started her career at the Herbarium Bogoriense in Bogor, Indonesia. A herbarium is like a library for dried plant samples. After finishing her PhD, she returned to Bogor and continued her work on bamboos.

In 1978, she moved to the UK. There, she kept studying how to classify different types of bamboos. She focused on bamboos found in the Old World Tropics, which are warm regions around the equator. She has written about bamboos from places like Malaysia, Thailand, and Madagascar.

Her hard work on bamboos was recognized when she became an honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This means she is a respected researcher there. She traveled to Southeast Asia and Madagascar with her husband, John Dransfield, who is also a plant expert. They shared their bamboo research at a meeting in Jakarta.

Discovering New Bamboo Species

Dransfield's research led to the discovery and description of 42 new types of upright bamboos. In the early 1990s, she collected bamboo samples from Luzon in the Philippines. These samples included types like Schizostachyum and Dinochloa. She used these samples to study and write new articles about bamboos.

She also worked on a three-year project to create a guide for identifying upright bamboos grown in the Philippines. This project helped gather new information and update the names of different bamboo species.

Research at Kew Herbarium

At the Kew Herbarium, Dransfield mainly studies bamboos from the Paleotropical Kingdom. This area includes tropical parts of Africa, Asia, and Australia. She worked with other botanists to identify 60 bamboo species. They carefully studied bamboo trunks, leaves, and shoots using a special computer program.

A type of bamboo called Soejatmia, found in Malaya and Thailand, was named after her to honor her important work.

Soejatmi Dransfield married John Dransfield in Malaysia in 1977.

Selected Publications

• A New Species and a New Combination of Cyrtochloa
• Sirochloa, a New Bamboo Genus from Madagascar (Poaceae-Bambusoideae)
• Cyrtochloa, a New Genus of Bamboo (Gramineae-Bambusoideae) from the Philippines
• Valiha and Cathariostachys, Two New Bamboo Genera (Gramineae-Bambusoideae) from Madagascar
• Notes on Bambusa diffusa (Gramineae-Bambusoideae) from Luzon, Philippines

Books

• The Bamboos of Sabah
• Plant Resources of South-East Asia: Bamboos. no 7

See also

In Spanish: Soejatmi Dransfield para niños