[8][9] By the early 80's, after decades of ongoing research, Tracey and Webb had accumulated a significant corpus of scientific evidence in support of the theory that Australian tropical rainforests had evolved in Gondwana over 100 million years ago and were not, as previously believed, relatively recent arrivals from South East Asia.

Tracey was initially educated at Saint Monica's and St Augustine's College in Cairns and spent much of his spare time in his early years fishing and exploring the mudflats, rainforest streams and swamps around the city's fringe.

He resigned from the position not long after starting on account of his dissatisfaction with the nature of the work which involved monitoring the fulfilment of soldier settlement land clearing conditions after the Second World War.

Their work in the field was to complement the new research being carried out by Alec Costin (Snowy Mountains and Alpine flora) and Milton Moore (the woodlands of Australia) within the ecology section of the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry.

A few years later Harry Wharton, a researcher interested in malaria and tropical diseases, offered Webb & Tracey some modern rooms in a new building being built for the division of animal culture laboratory at Long Pocket in Brisbane.

The Long Pocket location represented a substantial increase in laboratory space for Webb and Tracey and was to become the home of the CSIRO Rainforest Ecology unit up until its closure in the early 1980s.

[41][42][43] The maps had been produced to provide an ecological background for recent studies of the region by the authors and their collaborators, such as Jiro Kikkawa, W. T. Williams and M. B. Dale and were accompanied by a detailed explanatory key to the different vegetation types.