Gregor Yeates

1944-2012

Rev. 12/01/2020

 

 

 

Gregor Yeates was born in New Zealand in 1944. He attended the University of Canterbury and gained his bachelors degree with first class honors in 1966. During the second year of his studies at Canterbury, he attended lectures by a Nematologist, Dr. W.C. Clarke. Those lectures focused Dr. Yeates’ interests on nematodes. Dr. Yeates completed his Ph.D. in 1968, under the direction of Dr. Clarke, on the ecology of nematodes in coastal sand dunes. He was awarded a D.Sc. degree by the University of Canterbury in 1986.

After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Yeates spent a year in the Nematology Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station in England followed by a year at the Mols Laboratory in Denmark. Between 1970 and 1992, he was a soil scientist with the Soils Bureau of New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in Lower Hutt. Subsequently, he was appointed as a Senior Scientist at Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd in Palmerston North, New Zealand.  He continued his work as a soil zoologist until his retirement in 2011.  Dr. Yeates passed away August 6, 2012.

 

Dr. Yeates has been an extremely productive scientist with over 200 scientific papers and at least the same number of conference papers and reports. Within the field of soil ecology, he has published extensively on nematode community structures and the influence of environmental and management effects upon them. Many of his field observations and assessments have led to descriptions of new species of nematodes.

Dr. Yeates’ studies have contributed to greater understanding of the role of nematodes in soil ecosystems. The publication record reveals a pattern of system-specific faunal analyses followed by taxonomic descriptions and then synoptic papers of nematode survival, feeding habits, niche dimension, invasion biology or ecosystem services.

In the course of his ecological studies, Gregor Yeates has described 105 new species in a number of unrelated genera, e.g., Longidorus, Xiphinema, Hemicycliophora, Trischistoma, Dorylaimellus and Iotonchus.

Gregor Yeates has studied the ecology of nematodes, and other soil organisms, in environments ranging from Antarctica to northern Europe and in habitats that include sand dunes, pastures, forests, agricultural fields and invertebrate intestines.

 

Dr. Yeates has served on the editorial boards of several ecological and nematological journals and is a member of several societies including the New Zealand Society for Parasitologists, of which he was president. Dr. Yeates was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1998) and a Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Soil Science (1995).

In 2007, Dr. Gregor Yeates was named Fellow of the Society of Nematologists.

 

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