Betsy Rivers Jackes
Australian botanist and author
Betsy Rivers Jackes (born 1935) is an Australian botanist, researcher, taxonomist and author. Her research interests are the plants in the families Myrsinaceae and Vitaceae.
Education
Jackes completed her BSc in 1957, followed by her MSc in 1959, at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, New South Wales. She won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and took up a position as a research scholar at the University of Chicago (UC), where she earned her PhD in 1961.
Career
Jackes initially began work as a tutor in botany at UNE in 1957, before taking on the same role at the University of Queensland (UQ) in 1963. From 1973 through to 2018 she was a lecturer at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Queensland, where she headed the Tropical Plant Sciences Department, and was deputy head of the School of Tropical Biology. She is the author (or co-author) of many papers, articles, and environmental consultancy reports, and has published a number of books.
On Thursday, 24 March 2021, Jackes was presented one of the highest JCU awards, a Doctor of Science honoris causa, the sixth awardee for that degree at the university. This was for her sustained contributions to discovering and cataloguing tropical flora in northern Queensland, continued work with plant systematics and the ecology of the tropical flora.
Jackes was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21516848. VIAF identifies the subject as 68006246. The Library of Congress control number is n88019914. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1957, 1959 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Betsy Rivers Jackes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.