Guide to botanists’ performance appraisal

The New Scientist (Dec. 1984, p. 53) reported a distinct useful quality of a jungle plant from Northern Australia. This shows again the immense importance of the inexhaustible reservoir of phytochemical values present in native jungle plants. The article stressed the great importance for conservation of jungle reserves of tropical vegetation which represent untapped potentials for human welfare: ’An experiment is taking place in North Australia that may have far reaching repercussions in the utilization of native bush for commercial purposes. The landscape here is littered with ecological disasters coming from ill-conceived plans of large-scale clearing for exotic monocultures.