Richard Henry Yapp

Richard Henry Yapp (8 October 1871 – 22 January 1929) was an English botanist and an early ecologist, who held the Chair of Botany in Queen's University, Belfast, and the Mason Professorship of Botany at the University of Birmingham.

Early life and education Yapp was born on 8 October 1871 at Orleton, Herefordshire, England, the son of Jane (née Gammidge) and Richard Keysall Yapp, a landowner and farmer. After attending a private school at Leominster he was educated at Hereford's County School, but his education ended when he was 15 due to the death of his father.

Career Yapp was appointed botanist to Cambridge University's 1899–1900 expedition to the North-Eastern Malay States, led by Walter William Skeat. Specimens he collected on the expedition went to the Cambridge University Herbarium, with some in the National Collection at Kew.

On his return to Cambridge, he was curator of the university's herbarium from 1900 to 1903, He was appointed Professor of Botany at Aberystwyth University in 1904, adding to the university's museum collection specimens he collected in South Africa in 1905.

He served on the central committee of the Study and Survey of British Vegetation, later renamed the British Vegetation Committee. This group evolved, in 1913, into the British Ecological Society,

In 1914, he became Chair of Botany at Queen's University, Belfast. He was also assistant to Sir Arthur Yapp, his older brother, in the Ministry of Food during World War I. An adapted edition was also produced for Australian schools, in 1934.

Illness and death

By the time the new laboratories at Edgbaston were opened, in October 1927, Yapp was showing signs of ill health, and was soon unable to attend conferences. Nonetheless, in 1928 he was appointed President of the Botanical Section of the British Association. Obituaries, noting the unfinished work which he had planned, were published in The Times, Nature and the Journal of Ecology.

He was survived by his wife, Sofia Karolina (née Klintberg; 1886–1941) a Swedish woman whom he married in 1913, and a son and a daughter.