Joseph Burtt Davy (7 March 1870 Findern, Derbyshire – 20 August 1940 Birmingham) was a Quaker botanist and agrostologist.

He was the first curator of the Forest Herbarium (FHO) at the Imperial Forestry Institute when it was founded in 1924 under the Directorship of Professor Robert Scott Troup.

In 1891, he joined Kew Gardens as a technical assistant, leaving shortly after for the United States where he enrolled in the botany department at the University of California.

Davy wrote the pioneering work that was published in 1903, "Stock Ranges of Northwestern California: Notes on the Grasses and Forage Plants and Range Conditions" where he set out to discover what remained of the original native grasslands in the northwestern part of the State, and interviewed ranchers to determine what the sequence of the introduction of exotics to the grasslands occurred.

The report includes the counties of Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte, and the portion of Siskiyou lying west of the California and Oregon Railroad.

Burtt Davy wasted no time in starting a collection of Transvaal plants, a process by which he acquired an intimate knowledge of the subject.