The Kauai'i-headquartered National Tropical Botanical Garden has announced that British botanist Sir Ghillean Prance will receive its biennial Robert Allerton Award for Excellence in Tropical Botany or Horticulture.

Prance, a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, has specialized in the relationships between plants and people in the New World tropics as well as in the Pacific.

During 2001, he occupied the McBryde Chair at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, where he collaborated in a botanical and ethnobotanical survey of three islands in American Samoa, and taught graduate-level tropical ethnobotany classes.

He is chairman of the World Conservation Union's Tropical Rainforest Task Force Species Survival Commission, has written 19 books and edited 14 others.

"We have not yet identified all the plants on Earth, and we're losing them, I'm afraid, faster than we can catalog them. We are greatly reducing the opportunity for our children and grandchildren to benefit from the amazing properties that plants provide for us — from developing renewable building materials to repairing devastated soils to controlling emerging viruses," Prance said.

The award will be presented Oct. 24 in Washington, D.C.