The Plant Press

IAPT Honors Nicolson with Named Fund

From Plant Press, Vol. 11, No. 4 from October 2008.

Dan H. Nicolson has been honored by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) by having the first ever IAPT endowment for research awards named after him. Nicolson is being recognized for contributing to IAPT and its mission in numerous ways for over five decades. Once successfully established, one Nicolson Fund Award will be made each year. The Nicolson Fund is intended to support research that emphasizes nomenclatural and herbarium work.

During his career Nicolson has become widely known for his systematic work on the tropical plant family Araceae, but is especially well regarded as one of the foremost specialists on botanical nomenclature. His expertise has been widely sought for decades throughout the botanical community. Nicolson has contributed directly to IAPT in many forms over a period of decades, especially in the area of nomenclature: he has served on the Editorial Committee of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (1981-2007), the General Committee (1981-2000), the Spermatophyta Commit­tee (1975-1987; 2001-date), ­Committee on Typification of Generic Names (1978-1981), Committee on Orthography (1981-1987), Vice-President, Bureau of Nomenclature (1987), President, Bureau of Nomenclature (1999), President of Nomenclature Section (2005), and the Nomenclature Editor of Taxon (1979-1999). He also has served extensively as an IAPT officer including Vice President (1985-1993) and President (1993-1999). His recent out­standing contribution to our knowledge of the Forsters and the botany of the 2^nd Cook Expedition was recognized by receiving the IAPT Stafleu Medal for 2004.

Over his long career, Nicolson has taken on thousands of nomenclatural problems from colleagues worldwide. His thoroughness, friendliness, and balanced personality have always been ­appreciated and have allowed real progress to be made.

Awards and Grants

From Plant Press, Vol. 11, No. 4 from October 2008.

Alice Tangerini was nominated for and accepted a position on the Board of Directors for the American Society of Botanical Artists in August 2008 and has offered to work as an editor for the ASBA Members’ Gallery website.

At the 41^st Congress of the International Society for the History of Medicine in Mexico City, Alain Touwaide was elected Vice-President of the Society. In Sicily, Italy, Touwaide was awarded the Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Science by the Rector of the University of Messina.

Based on voting among members of American Society of Plant Taxonomists, Warren Wagner became President Elect of ASPT in September and will assume the President’s role after the meeting in 2009 in Snowbird, Utah.

At the Botany 2008 meetings in Vancouver, Canada, Wagner was awarded the Botanical Society of America Merit Award, the highest honor given by the society. It is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to the science of botany.

Honoring the Botanical Work of José Cuatrecasas

From Plant Press, Vol. 11, No. 4 from October 2008.

The José Cuatrecasas Botanical Endowment is entering its second decade! I would like to reflect briefly on the accomplishments made with this invaluable resource, and announce a significant addition to the endowment this year by the Cuatrecasas Family Foundation of San Diego.

In 1996 the Department of Botany announced the establishment of the Cuatrecasas fund based on a donation from his family and a number of others. This endowment honors the lifelong botanical work of Dr. José Cuatrecasas (1903-1996), a pioneering botanist. His research, especially in the family Asteraceae, was devoted to classification, biogeography, exploration, and ecology.

The Cuatrecasas fund is used to support three primary activities: research travel awards, the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany, and lectures and symposia such as the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium. The research awards support projects that emulate the spirit of the research of Cuatrecasas. Selections are made annually through a competition open to all botanists, but are especially focused on students and young professionals conducting research in Andean South America and other tropical areas. The fellowships provide funding for researchers to be in residence for their work and use the collections of the U.S. National Herbarium and to conduct related field studies. We initiated the travel awards three years ago and to date we have already had nearly 20 Cuatrecasas Fellows. The fellowship awards not only have allowed botanists to improve the quality of their research and interactions with our staff, but will have a lasting influence on their developing careers and increase the capacity of botanical research in South America. We are establishing a tracking system to check on previous awardees to monitor what they have done since their visit to work at the U.S. National Herbarium.

TL-2 Speaks Volumes

From Plant Press, Vol. 11, No. 4 from October 2008.

By Laurence J. Dorr and Dan H. Nicolson

TL-2 is a deceptively simple abbreviation for a multi-volume publication that is enormously valuable to systematic botanists (and zoologists) and a publication whose scope has few parallels in natural history. Its full title, Taxonomic Literature: A selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types (second edition), also is understated and does not adequately convey the full measure of what these volumes deliver. Simply put TL-2 is a guide to the literature of systematic botany published between 1753 and 1940. When completed later this year TL-2 will comprise 15 volumes published over the course of 32 years. There will be a total of 11,318 pages devoted to biographical and bibliographical analyses of 37,600 titles published by 9,072 authors. The publication is one of several projects supported by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and one which from its inception has been closely tied to the Smithsonian Institution, especially the U.S. National Herbarium.

TL-2 deals, as far as publications are concerned, with books, pamphlets, series, and other bibliographically independent and limited entities, but not with open-ended periodical or serial publications. Although the temporal coverage is more or less defined by the years 1753 and 1940, there is a special emphasis on the period between 1870 and 1914, a period in which descriptive plant taxonomy reached its zenith and for which no comprehensive bibliography is available. The beginning date corresponds with the starting date for most plant scientific names, viz. the Species Plantarum (1 May 1753) of Linnaeus. (Critical earlier works by pre-Linnaean authors are included in TL-2 so that one can interpret Linnaean protologues). The ending date, 1940, is more arbitrarily defined and corresponds to the date when changes in publication and distribution made most botanical titles widely available. Inasmuch as the intent is to provide information on titles of interest to botanists there are no restrictions on language. The majority of publications analyzed are in German, English, French and Latin, but publications in languages that are less commonly utilized such as Catalan and Romansh also are included.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Neocuatrecasia

From  Plant Press, Vol. 11, No. 4 from October 2008.

Neocuatrecasia was named for José Cuatrecasas. It is a genus of ca. 12 species restricted to the eastern escarpment of the Andes in Bolivia and Peru. The area is very poorly collected, and almost every collection of the genus has proved to be a previously unknown species.