On August 3, 1993, Al Gentry while traveling along with four other conservation scientists perished in a tragic plane crash in Ecuador while conducting fieldwork as a member of Conservation International's Rapid Assessment Program. His death was a tremendous loss to both tropical botany and to neotropical conservation. Gentry, field botanist and a senior curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden was famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of tropical plants and his relentless drive. During a career that spanned twenty-five years Gentry collected nearly 80,000 plant specimens and published close to 200 scientific papers. He applied his extensive knowledge to address urgent conservation problems, particularly those found in the South American tropics and rainforest regions.