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Argentina

Dr Darién Prado while on field work
The Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Rosario National University (FCA-UNR), is a well-known Argentinean education and research institute with 300 staff (including about 40 members of the national scientific council CONICET), and it is considered to be among the best five agricultural colleges in the country. There are over 90 postgraduate students (at doctorate or MSc level) in course at present. The Botany and Ecology group, Department of Biology has an almost 40 year history of working in the Paraná river gallery forests, Chaco vegetation and SDTF in Argentina, and the group has many links to national conservation bodies. Network Partner Dr Darién Prado has worked on subtropical (Chaco) and tropical dry forests since 1979, with the main focus on understanding the floristic composition, the distribution patterns and vegetation dynamics, and later the historical biogeography of Latin American SDTF (first worker to suggest that they may have been more widespread in cooler, drier climates of the Pleistocene). His over 30 years of field experience and publications have reinforced the awareness of the poorly known nature of the flora of many SDTF areas, and with the motivation to improve the knowledge and conservation of these forests he joined Toby Pennington in this network.