Joseph Burtt Davy was a Quaker botanist and agrostologist. He was the first curator of the Forest Herbarium at the Imperial Forestry Institute when it was founded in 1924 under the Directorship of Professor Robert Scott Troup.
He attended school at Ilkley in West Yorkshire. 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. Here he studied agriculture from 1893–96 and took up the post of botanist at the Agricultural Experiment Station in California between 1896–1901, describing the Cyperaceae and Gramineae for A Flora of Western Middle California by Willis Linn Jepson. Here he also met his wife-to-be, Alice Bolton, a native Californian.
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.