Patricia A. Wolseley

Pat Wolseley (born 1938) is a British botanist and illustrator, specialising in lichen.

Patricia Anne Wolsely studied botany at Somerville College, Oxford and then was employed at the Natural History Museum, London from 1960. She had always made illustrations of her research and later attended an art school. From 1966 until 1977 she worked at the University of Malta then returning to the Natural History Museum in London first as a Leverhulme Research Fellow and then as a Scientific Associate.

In 2012, she featured in an episode of BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific.

She has long-term collaborations on lichens in tropical forests in South-East Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, using lichens as indicators of environmental change considering air quality and logging. This has involved developing keys and checklists for the local lichen floras as well as identifying new species.

In 2021 she was awarded the Marsh Botany Award by the Marsh Charitable Trust in recognition of her pioneering work on lichens as indicators of air pollution as well as work on training in identification of lichens. The lichen genus Wolseleyidea was named in her honour in 2019.

Publications Wolseley is co-author and illustrator of a number of books. These include:

Heather Angel and Pat Wolseley (1992) Family Water Naturalist: a practical expedition to the worlds of ponds, rivers and the sea shore Bloomsbury Books, 192pp Francis Rose and Pat Wolseley (1984) Nettlecombe Park: Its History and Its Epiphytic Lichens - An Attempt at Correlation Academic Journal Offprint from The Journal of the Field Studies Council, Volume 6, No. 1, November 1984. 50 pp, 14 figs Sylvia Haslam, Charles Sinker and Pat Wolseley (1982), British Water Plants, Field Studies Council Pat Wolseley (1981) Field Key to the Flowering Plants of Iceland, Hydra Books,

She is also the author or co-author of at least 30 scientific publications and book chapters. These include:

Christopher J. Ellis, Claudia E. Steadman, Massimo Vieno, Sudipt Chatterjee and ten other co-authors including Pat Wolseley (2022) Estimating nitrogen risk to Himalayan forests using thresholds for lichen bioindicators. Biological Conservation Volume 265, 109401 DOI10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109401 Wolseley, PA, James, PW, Theobald, MR and Sutton, MA (2006) Detecting changes in epiphytic lichen communities at sites affected by atmospheric ammonia from agricultural sources. The Lichenologist volume 38 161-176 DOI 10.1017/S0024282905005487 Nimis, PL, Scheidegger, C and Wolseley, PA (2002) Monitoring with lichens - Monitoring lichens. Editors of NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Lichen Monitoring in Wales, August 16–23, 2000 Wolseley, PA and Aguirre Hudson, B (1997) The ecology and distribution of lichens in tropical deciduous and evergreen forests of northern Thailand. Journal of Biogeography volume 24 327-343 DOI10.1046/j.1365-2699.1997.00124.x