News Release
October 2000
(Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) -- The Moravian College Alumni
Association announced the first lecture of the fall Monday Roundtable
series. Dr. John Bevington will present, "The Amazonian Rainforest,"
a slide show and lecture on October 2, at 7:00 p.m in Moravian College’s
Prosser Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public. Bevington
will share the adventure of a recent trip to the Amazon and Napo Rivers
near Iquitos, Peru with Moravian students. His observations will discuss
the structure, complexity, and ethnobotany of a lowland tropical ecosystem
in the Peruvian Amazon.
"Tropical forests are the most complex and
species-rich ecosystems on earth," said Bevingnton. "These
forests occupy only about 7% of the earth’s land mass yet ecologists
estimate they contain more than half of all species. Because of worldwide
deforestation this enormous storehouse of biological diversity is disappearing
at an alarming rate. Some scientists feel that the loss of tropical
forests will deprive us of important new drugs and medicines while other
suggest that tropical deforestation may alter global climate patterns."
Dr. Bevington is Professor of Biology at Moravian College.
He majored in botany and chemistry at Indiana State University, and
earned his Masters and Ph.D. in plant physiology at Purdue University.
In brief, his post-doctoral training since 1976 includes courses and
research work in plant cell and tissue culture; a grant to study control
of gene expression in specific embryos; DNA technology; plant tissue
culture; molecular genetics; immunobiology; laboratory research and
biological field studies. Professionally, Dr. Bevington has been the
recipient of numerous grants and awards during his distinguished career.
Among his research interests are plant physiological ecology—
the physiological mechanisms by which plants adapt to their local environment;
plant/animal interactions; role of plant domestication in the rise of
culture; plant biosystems; aquatic entomology of fresh water streams;
and trout behavior as influenced by light and temperature. He has served
as reviewer for manuscripts submitted to three international journals
on plant physiology and botany and is a published author in his field.
Moravian College is a private, coeducational, selective
liberal arts college located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tracing its
founding to 1742, it is recognized as America's sixth-oldest college.
Visit the Web site at www.moravian.edu.
