From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 4 from October 2009.
Soreng captures the wild and elusive Poa horridula Pilg. in Peru in 2007. (Photo by K. Romaschenko)
Robert John Soreng was born in Evanston, Illinois, on December 9, 1952. His family moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1961, where he learned early on to enjoy outdoor pursuits of camping, hiking, fishing, and study of nature. His college degrees include a B.S. degree at Oregon State University in 1978 (where he was introduced to grass taxonomy by Kenton Chambers and became fascinated by grasses), and M.S. (in Range and Animal Sciences with Stephan Hatch and Kelly Allred) and Ph.D. (in Biology with Richard Spellenberg) degrees at New Mexico State University in 1980 and 1986. Although NMSU ecology and systematics students typically focused on desert shrub and grasslands, Soreng gravitated to the mountains and the genus Poa, a fortuitous choice for the coincidence of beautiful mountains and species of Poa around the world. He conducted postdoctoral research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Cornell University (where he began a long collaboration with Jerrold Davis) focusing on the systematics of grasses.
He began working with Paul Peterson (Smithsonian Curator of Grasses) and Gerrit Davidse (John S. Lehmann Curator of Grasses, Missouri Botanical Garden) on the Catalogue of New World Grasses in 1993; Dan Nicolson (US) and Gerrit Davidse helped develop Soreng’s expertise in nomenclature for this project. He moved to Somerset Maryland in 1996 and has been working at the U.S. National Herbarium ever since.
Soreng at 4,380 m in Peruvian altiplano with his flock in 2007
Soreng’s research interests focus on the taxonomy, biogeography, character evolution, and breeding systems of Poaceae (alt nom. Gramineae; grasses; about 13,000 species), especially of the cool season grasses (subfamily Pooideae; about 4,700 species). An ongoing revision of genus Poa (bluegrasses; over 500 species) is a life-long project. Asked to explain what he does he said: “I employ traditional and molecular characters at all taxonomic levels within the grasses and deal extensively with nomenclature and classification in the family.”
One of his major contributions to the field is the databasing of grass nomenclature and taxonomy in TROPICOS (Missouri Botanical Garden’s on-line taxonomic database). He estimates that the database now has more than 80,000 scientific names published for grass taxa, including original publications, types, and secondary literature citations, and links to specimens, maps, and images, synonymy, and other databases <http://www.tropicos.org/Home.aspx>.