James Joseph Pojar

James "Jim" Joseph Pojar (born January 12, 1948, in Ramsey, Minnesota) Is an American-Canadian field botanist, forester, and ecologist. In 2015 the Canadian Botanical Association awarded him the George Lawson Medal for lifetime achievement.

Biography After graduating with a master's degree in botany from the University of Minnesota, Pojar studied from 1970 to 1974 at the University of British Columbia. His 1974 Ph.D. thesis Relation of the reproductive biology of plants to the structure and function of four plant communities was supervised by Katherine "Kay" I. Beamish. Pojar became involved with Vladimir Krajina's Ecological Reserves (ERs) Program at its inception in 1972. Krajina hired, as field summer assistants, Pojar, along with some of Pojar's fellow graduate students, such as Karel Klinka. Krajina collaborated with some fellow academics, such as Geoffrey G. E. Scudder, Thomas H. Carefoot (b. 1938), and Robert Charles Brooke (1934-2014), to do field surveys. After his graduation in 1974, Pojar worked as a biological consultant for about a year and a half and then became employed by Krajina's ERs for three years and a few months. The goals of the ERs Program were to set aside and protect government-owned areas in British Columbia. The two primary goals for protection were to promote scientific research and to have natural benchmarks for evaluating land management and human use in other areas. Krajina's ERs Program successfully set aside several environmental reserves, of which the Gladys Lake Ecological Reserve is especially noteworthy. Near the beginning of the decades of the 1980s, Pojar resigned from the ERs Project and joined the Canadian Forest Service.

Pojar is the author or co-author of many scientific articles and reports, as well as several books, including field guides for plants to be identified by amateur botanists. His wife Rosamund is among the contributors to some of his books. Jim Pojar's book Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon & Alaska, co-authored by Andy McKinnon and Paul B. Alaback, sold 250,000 copies as of the year 2013.

According to Jim Pojar, commercial logging of primary old-growth forests and replacing them with managed tree plantations can cause a 40 to 50 percent reduction in carbon sequestration. He advocates preserving and protecting British Columbia's natural forests with as much old-growth as possible, especially in British Columbia's wetter regions. He says that lack of protection of the forests increases the damage caused by "wildfires, insect outbreaks, and blowdowns.

Selected publications Articles

Books abstract, gov.bc.ca, The official website of the Government of British Columbia