Leslie Rensselaer Holdridge (1907-1999) was born in Ledyard, Connecticut. He studied forestry at the University of Maine and graduated in 1931. He worked as a reforestation foreman in Kisatchie National Forest, Louisiana, before he moved to Puerto Rico in 1935. In Puerto Rico, he was appointed head of the planting department of the Caribbean National Forest (1935-1938), and then forester for the U.S. Forestry Service (1938-1941). In the 1940's he managed the forestry division of the Haitian rubber production company, Société Haitiano-Americaine Development Agricole, and also carried out research on cinchona in Colombia and Guatemala. In 1947, he received his Ph.D. in botany from the University of Michigan. In 1949, Holdridge moved to Costa Rica, taking up directorship of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture from 1950-1951. He remained as the head of its natural resources department until 1960. In the 1960's he worked as a private ecological consultant and on Central American fieldwork for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, before he returned to Costa Rica's Tropical Science Centre in 1967. He published many important works, such as, Life Zone Ecology, and Forest Environments in Tropical Life Zones. He spent four years as a part-time professor of ecology and dendrology at the Costa Rican Instituto Tecnológico (1978-1982) before retiring.
Smithsonian Institution Archives Field Book Project: Person : Description : rid_405_pid_EACP402
