Flora of North America appoints Executive Director

[John McNeill]

The Flora of North America (FNA), a project to produce a systematic
account of all the plants of America north of the Mexico-U.S.
border, has just appointed its first full-time Executive Director
and Chief Executive Officer.  Charles Levine of New York takes up
this position on May 1.  A brief biography of Charles Levine, who
has extensive experience in scientific and other publishing
projects is appended.

The Flora of North America project was launched in its present form
in the mid 1980's and to date has published four of its projected
26 vascular plant volumes, with four others close to submission for
publication.  It recently received significant financial support
over a five-year period from Chanticleer, Wayne, Pennsylvania,
conditional on its returning to its projected publication rate of
two volumes per year.

The project now operates from a number of editorial centers in the
United States, including the Botanical Research Institute of Texas
(BRIT), Fort Worth; the Buffalo Museum of Science (BUF), New York;
The Arboretum, Flagstaff, Arizona; Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass.; the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburgh;
the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO), St. Louis; the New York
Botanical Garden (NY), Bronx; the University of North Carolina
Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill; and Utah State University (UTC),
Logan.  The project also has some 40 Taxon Editors located at these
and other institutes, principally in the U.S. and Canada.  The
authors of generic treatments (or in some cases treatments of
subdivisions of genera) represent experts on these groups from
throughout the World.  In addition the project benefits from a
network of Regional Reviewers (and Co-ordinators) covering the
whole of the United States, Canada, and Greenland (-- and St.
Pierre & Miquelon!).

I am sure that all Taxacom readers involved in the Flora of North
America project will join me in welcoming Charles Levine and
wishing him and the project all success as it moves forward to its
two-volume per year schedule.

John McNeill
Chair, FNA Management Committee


CHARLES M. LEVINE: Bio-in-Brief

Charles Levine is an innovative publishing executive with
significant global experience in the development and management of
content for both digital and print media.  He has held senior
management positions with Random House, Simon & Schuster, John
Wiley, and Macmillan.

For many years, Charles has worked on the forefront of electronic
publishing - managing electronic databases; SGML/HTML data and
document mark-up systems; multimedia publishing; and Web site
design and content.

Harnessing both his technical skills and global background, he has
successfully built brand names and lines of publications, including
books with Scientific American; the J.K. Lasser Tax Institute; the
Random House Websterþs Dictionaries; and the Insight Travel Guides,
among many others.

Most recently, while also consulting for publishing clients,
Charles has been part-time Vice-president of Content and Strategic
Development for start-up Etronica.com of Pacific Palisades,
California.  (Etronica licenses innovative software to enhance the
search functions and customer-tracking capabilities of content-
intensive Web sites þ from news to entertainment to publishing.)

Charles began his publishing career in Singapore, after a stint
working in India on rural development projects.  Having spent over
a decade working in Asia, he maintains business contacts in this
important, expanding marketplace.

Charles has an M.A. from Indiana University in the History of
Philosophy of Science, and graduated with honors from Columbia
College, majoring in Physics.


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John McNeill, Director Emeritus, Royal Ontario Museum;
    Honorary Associate, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.
Mailing address:
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, EH3 5LR, Scotland, U.K.
Telephone:    +44-131-248-2862;  fax: +44-131-248-2901
Home office:  +44-162-088-0651;  fax: +44-162-088-0342
e-mail:  jmcneill at rbge.org.uk or johnm at rom.on.ca
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