Ken Marr has been botany curator with the Royal BC Museum since 2001. His PhD is from the University of British Columbia, where he also did post-doctoral studies before heading to China for two and a half years to study ethnobotany, specifically crop domestication of several cucurbits, at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (Chinese Academy of Sciences). He taught plant taxonomy courses at the University of Wyoming and the University of Montana for one year prior to beginning at the Royal BC Museum. Ken is interested especially in the classification, biogeography and conservation of terrestrial vascular plants, in particular the alpine flora of British Columbia, Canada. He did not ‘fall very far from the tree’, his father founded the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Ken is actively working to document the distribution of non-native plant species in British Columbia through plant identification workshops and encouraging the collection of voucher specimens.