Edward Percy Stebbing FRGS, FZS (4 January 1872–21 March 1960) was a pioneering British forester

Forester

250px|thumb|right|Foresters of [[Southern University of Chile|UACh]] in the [[Valdivian forest]]s of San Pablo de Tregua, ChileA forester is a person who practices forestry, the science, art, and profession of managing forests. Foresters engage in a broad range of activities including timber...

 and forest entomologist in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. He was among the first to warn of desertification and desiccation

Desiccation

Desiccation is the state of extreme dryness, or the process of extreme drying. A desiccant is a hygroscopic substance that induces or sustains such a state in its local vicinity in a moderately sealed container.-Science:...

and wrote on "The encroaching Sahara". In 1935, he wrote of the "desert whose power is incalculable and whose silent and almost invisible approach must be difficult to estimate." He suggested that this was man-made and this led to a joint Anglo-French forestry mission from December 1936 to February 1937 that toured northern Nigeria and Niger to assess the danger of desertification.

Works

• Insect intruders in Indian homes (1909) online
• Stalks in the Himalayas (1911) (New York Times review
• Jungle By-ways in India (1911) online
• Indian forest insects of economic importance. Coleoptera (1914) online
• British Forestry (1916) online
• From Czar to Bolshevik (1918) online
• The Forests of India (3 volumes)
• The forests of West Africa and the Sahara: a Study of Modern Conditions (London and Edinburgh, 1937)