Leonard James Webb was a widely awarded Australian ecologist and ethnobotanist who was the author or joint-author of over 112 scientific papers throughout the course of his professional career. Employed as a researcher by the CSIRO from the early 1950's until his retirement in 1980, Webb initially worked as a contributor to the Australian Phytochemical Survey. In the mid 50's Webb established the CSIRO Rainforest Ecology Unit at Long Pocket Laboratories, commencing a long research partnership with Rainforest ecologist Geoff Tracey which, several years later, led to the publication of the first systematic classification of Australian rainforest vegetation in the Journal of Ecology in 1959. In November 1965 Webb, accompanied by Geoff Tracey, conducted a vegetation survey in the Wet Tropics which resulted in Webb putting forward a series of national park proposals in 1966 for the purpose of protecting the full range of the remaining habitats of the Wet Tropics. Entitled "The Identification and Conservation of Habitat Types in the Wet Tropical Lowlands of North Queensland", Webb's report was the first report of its kind and contained the first reference in scientific literature to the international significance of the lowland rainforests of the Wet Tropics. The proposals in Webb's report were specifically confined to the lowlands because of the extreme development pressures which had been placed on the lowlands from around the mid-1950s onwards. In 1975, a year after Peter Stanton, of the Queensland National Parks Dept. published an extensive field review of the conservation status of the wet tropics confirming that "the areas Webb and Tracey had identified were still some of the highest priorities for conservation",Webb and Tracey published a collection of 15 vegetation maps entitled "Vegetation of the Humid Tropical Region of North Queensland" which were used extensively in support of a number of major conservation campaigns across Queensland. These events ultimately culminated in many of the areas within Webb's 1966 report, including the Cape Tribulation and Daintree regions, being gazetted as National Parks in 1981. In the early '80s after decades of ongoing research, Webb and Tracey had accumulated a large corpus of scientific evidence which confirmed that Australian tropical rainforests had evolved from Gondwana over 100 million years ago and were not, as previously believed, relatively recent arrivals from South East Asia. This new understanding of the origins of Australian rainforests in addition to the publication of Geoff Tracey's 1982 paper "The Vegetation of the Humid Tropical Region of North Queensland" significantly contributed to the scientific basis for the subsequent successful World Heritage nomination of the Wet Tropics of Queensland in 1988. Webb was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia in the 1987 Queen's Birthday Honours Ceremony "For service to conservation, particularly in the field of rainforest ecology" He was also later awarded the Civilian Service Medal 1939–1945 in 1995 and the Australian Centenary Medalin 2001 for "For service to conservation and the environment in Queensland".
