Beever, Jessica Eleanor (née Spragg)   (1946 -  )

Born on 26 June 1946 in Hamilton, New Zealand;

She has New Zealand Maori ancestry on her mother's side, as well as English and Scottish forebears who emigrated to NZ several generations ago.

Her earliest memories of the natural world include family picnics by fast-flowing forest streams, cold water, but sun-baked rocks, on the slopes of the mountain Taranaki, near her family's next home in New Plymouth.

The family moved to Auckland City when she was 5 years old, but some 10 years later her mother, a school-teacher, took her on several Adult Education trips to Mt Taranaki, and the mountains of the central North Island.

Botany degrees (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) at the University of Auckland followed. There she got to know her future husband, fellow botanist Ross Beever.

They married in 1969 and travelled together to the University of Leeds in England, where each did a PhD, Jessica in plant science (1972).

The Spragg family had a holiday home in the forest of the Waitakere Ranges, where Ross and Jessica began their married life and her fascination with mosses.

She undertook research on New Zealand's mosses for the next 35 years, producing some 30 scientific papers and a similar number of reports and submissions relating to mosses.

Conferences early in her career, in Sydney, Australia (1981) and Tokyo, Japan (1983), together with a year in the UK (1980-81), gave her opportunities to see mosses in foreign habitats and to cement friendships with many bryologists.

She undertook field collecting in Australia in 1981, 1988, 1993-4, 2002, and 2007.

Her extensive revision of the popular book The Mosses of New Zealand was published in 1992.

She was a frequent participant in the annual John Child Bryophyte Workshops from their inception in 1983, and a member of the Department of Conservation's expert panel on threatened bryophytes.

Ross and her were long-time members of the Offshore Islands Research Group, whereby she was able to document the mosses of many of New Zealand's northern offshore islands, sometimes with their two children if permits allowed.

In 1992 a monotypic, NZ endemic moss genus, Beeveria, was named in her honour by Allan Fife.

Source: Extracted from:
https://citscihub.s3.amazonaws.com/BEEVER_Beeveria_distophylloides.pdf
https://bryology.org/jessica-beever/
Portrait Photo: 2021, from https://bryology.org/jessica-beever/.

Collecting localities for 'Beever, J." OR "J E Beever' from AVH (2026)

Data from 5,430 specimens