Rohan Pethiyagoda
| Rohan Pethiyagoda | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Tilak Rohan David Pethiyagoda 19 November 1955 Colombo, Sri Lanka |
| Residence | Sydney, Australia |
| Nationality | Sri Lankan |
| Education | B.Sc., M.Phil |
| Alma mater | King's College, London, University of Sussex |
| Occupation | Taxonomist |
| Years active | 1990–present |
| Employer | Australian Museum |
| Notable work |
Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka (1990) Pearls, spices and green gold: an illustrated history of biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka (2007) Horton Plains: Sri Lanka's cloud-forest national park (2012) |
| Awards | Rolex Award for Enterprise |
| Website | The Wildlife Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka |
Rohan David Pethiyagoda (abbreviated to Rohan Pett by deed poll in 2010), is one of Sri Lanka's leading naturalist and a taxonomist on Freshwater fish of Sri Lanka.
Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 19 November 1955. Secondary education at St Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia. B.Sc. (Eng.) Hons. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King’s College, University of London 1977; M.Phil. in Biomedical Engineering, University of Sussex 1980.
From 1981-82 Pethiyagoda served as an engineer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka, and from 1982-87 as director of that institution. In 1984 he was concurrently appointed chairman of Sri Lanka’s Water Resources Board.
He resigned from government office in 1987 to commence work on a project to explore the island’s freshwater fishes, which led to his first book, Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka (1990), a richly-illustrated account of the country’s freshwater-fish fauna.
Pethiyagoda diverted the profits from this book to an endowment for the Wildlife Heritage Trust (WHT), a foundation he established in 1990 to further biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka, with the business-model of publishing natural-history books and channeling the proceeds into further exploration and research. Between 1991 and 2012 WHT published some 40 books in both English and Sinhala, including widely circulated titles such as A field guide to the birds of Sri Lanka, one of several titles translated into Sinhala and, aided by a grant from the Biodiversity Window of the World Bank / Netherlands Partnership Programme, provided free to 5,000 school libraries. This program served, for the first time in Sri Lanka, to put scientific local-language biodiversity texts in the hands of young people.
Together with colleagues at WHT Pethiyagoda has been responsible for the discovery and/or description of almost 100 new species of vertebrates from Sri Lanka, including fishes, amphibians and lizards, in addition to 43 species of freshwater crabs. This work also led to the finding that some 19 species of Sri Lankan amphibians have become extinct in the past 130 years, the highest national extinction record in the world.
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