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PLANT SYSTEMATICS WORLD

Edited by Vicki Funk

SANTIAGO DÍAZ PIEDRAHITA (1944–2014), COLOMBIAN SYNANTHEROLOGIST AND HISTORIAN

Professor Santiago Díaz Piedrahita, long known as the Colom-bian expert on Compositae (synantherologist), passed away unex-pectedly on 4 March 2014, just before his 70th birthday. A few days before, on 23 February, he had collapsed in his car on his way to the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, in Bogotá.

Prof. Díaz Piedrahita’s first love in the Compositae family (Asteraceae) was the Espeletiinae, the impressive stem-rosettes of the páramos, and Espeletia oswaldiana S.Díaz (1970) was his first described species. The species name was dedicated to his father Oswaldo Díaz Díaz, a devoted historian and writer. In February 1972 the first author collected an unknown Espeletia in the south-ern Páramo de Guantiva, on a ridge West of Belén, Boyacá, which Díaz Piedrahita later published as Espeletia brachyaxiantha S.Díaz (1972). A long list of new species of Espeletiinae would follow until 2010, when he published his last one, Espeletiopsis laxiflora S.Díaz & Rodríguez-Cabeza. Recently a new species of frailejón was named after him: Espeletiopsis diazii M.Diazgranados & R.L.Sánchez (2013).

Don José Cuatrecasas (1903–1996), the “father” of the Espe-letiinae studies, actively worked on a monograph of the group (pub-lished posthumously in 2013) for most of his academic life, and Díaz Piedrahita was considered by some to be the successor of Cuatrecasas. Díaz Piedrahita and Cuatrecasas met in 1970 in Bogota and they com-bined their interests to produce a treatment for Pentacalia and Den-drophorbium (published posthu-mously in 1999). In addition, Díaz Piedrahita published 32 names for Pentacalia.

However, the talents of Díaz Piedrahita were not limited to his work in botany. He was president of the Academia Colombiana de Historia and a member of a large number of regional academies of history in Colombia, as well as those of a number of cities such as Bogota, Mariquita, Cartagena and Mompox. He was a corresponding

member of academies of history of Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Uru-guay, Ecuador, San Salvador and Chile, and many other institutions of this kind. He was also active in the Real Academia Española de Lengua and a corresponding member of the Academia Española de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Díaz Piedrahita served as secretary (1984–1989) of the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales in Bogotá (with seat number 22), and later as director of its journal (1988–2006).

Díaz Piedrahita wrote 27 books, 26 book chapters, 51 scientific papers, and 71 papers in social sciences (mainly in history and litera-ture; see Electronic Supplement to the online version of this article for a complete list of publications; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iapt/tax). He produced treatments and detailed studies for legumes and various tribes of Compositae: Barnadesieae, Mut-isieae, Astereae, Senecioneae, Lactuceae, Inuleae, Anthemideae, Tageteae, Liabeae, Eupatorieae and Heliantheae. In the context of historical botany, Díaz Piedrahita edited four volumes of the Flora de la Real Expedición, and he was author of books on Mutis, Caldas and Triana, just to mention a few. In the course of his stud-ies he described at least 104 species (for a complete list see Elec-tronic Supplement, http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iapt/tax), mainly in Compositae, and eight taxa have been named in his honor: Aragoa ×diazii Fern.Alonso; Berberis diazii L.A.Camargo; Critoniopsis diazii H.Rob.; Gunnera diazii L.E.Mora; Heliopsis lanceolata var. diazii R.K.Jansen & Stuessy; Pseudosarcopera diaz-piedrahitae (Gir.-Cañas) Gir.-Cañas; Espeletiopsis diazii Diazgr. & Sánchez; and Schwartzia diaz-piedrahitae Gir.-Cañas.

During his career he received many honors and awards (e.g., from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia; from the Asociación

Colombiana para el Avance de la Ciencia in 2003; and from the Academia Colombiana de Cien-cias Ex., Fís. y Nat., the Premio a la Obra integral de un Científico in 2008). His most important award was the Premio Iberoamericano de Botánica José Celestino Mutis, received in March 2012 in Cádiz, Spain. The citation for this award referenced Díaz Piedrahita’s exceptional botanical, cultural, linguistic and historical con-tributions. Indeed, he has been commemorated by Colombian journals as a successor of Mutis.

Santiago Díaz Piedrahita with Espeletiopsis corymbosa (Humb. & Bonpl.) Cuatrec., in 1979. (Photograph by V. Funk).

Version of Record (identical to print version). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.12705/634.34

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Colombia has lost an impressive botanist and historian, one who made substantial contributions to science and culture and we have lost a valued colleague and friend.

Personal impressionsAntoine: Santiago Díaz Piedrahita was a good friend who was

always ready to serve the scientific community. After his retirement from the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, where he was a Profes-sor, as well as spending some years as acting Director and Dean of the Faculty, he dedicated himself to new goals and continued his work. I met him in Bogotá in November 1971, at the Instituto and I went with him several times to the páramo, and shared many adventures. I remember one expedition when he and his team were arrested after one month of fieldwork in Sumapaz without a shower, and with dirty clothes and boots and unshaved faces. From the very beginning Díaz Piedrahita was very friendly, “muy cordial”, and a gifted Compositae botanist. He was dedicated and persistent in his taxonomic work and historical research. At the time of his death Diaz Piedrahita and his wife, Clemencia Manrique, were planning a trip to Europe (Cologne, Berlin, Italy and Spain) for his 70th birthday on 18 July and I was planning on meeting them at that time. Over the years our friendship never ended and I was looking forward to seeing him again.

Mauricio: It was 2005 and I was getting ready to start my Ph.D. thesis working on the Espeletiinae. I tried to contact Prof. Díaz Piedrahita but his secretary at the Academia Nacional de Historia told me that he had a pretty busy agenda with committees and meetings. I said “please tell him that I need to talk to him about my future dissertation on Espeletiinae”. Seconds later he was on the phone, and the same evening we met at his office. In a matter

of minutes he was giving me all sort of tricks about the morphol-ogy of the group, something that he acquired after long years of work on the Compositae. At that point we began a fruitful relation-ship that was the beginning of a very long collaboration. In 2013 Roberto Sánchez and I dedicated a species of Espeletiinae to him and when we described Espeletiopsis diazii, a beautiful and very unusual species. The news about his death came so unexpectedly

that it was hard to believe. For all of us that had the honour to work with and learn from him, it is going to be difficult to continue working on the Compositae without him.

Vicki: When I was a graduate student I met Santiago at the herbarium (COL). He introduced me to fieldwork in Colombia and to many col-leagues and friends. He was extremely helpful even accompanying us into the field on the first day of collecting. Since then our paths crossed many times under different circumstances (field work, teaching, herbarium visits) and he was always the same: gracious, helpful, and gener-ous. I can’t imagine Colombian botany without him and I know the Compositae have lost their Colombian champion.

Antoine M. Cleef,1 Mauricio Diazgranados2,3 & Vicki A. Funk21 Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem

Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam

2 Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012, U.S.A

3 Jardín Botánico José Celestino Mutis, Bogotá, DC 111071, Colombia

Santiago Díaz Piedrahita (2nd from the right) and colleagues, during the First Workshop on Colombian Compositae (10 August 2011). Vicki Funk and Mauricio Diazgranados (both with red jackets) organized the workshop. (Photograph by M. Diazgranados)

Santiago Díaz Piedrahita (left) and Antoine Cleef (23 November 2007). (Photograph by C. Manrique)

Version of Record (identical to print version).

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Plant Systematics WorldTAXON 63 (4) • August 2014: 959

WORLD FLORA ONLINE COUNCIL MET IN ST. PETERSBURG

The World Flora Online (WFO) is being coordinated by a con-sortium of botanical organizations (managed by a council of bota-nists and IT experts) under the auspices of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation (GPPC), as a response to Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). A total of 194 countries are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity which, through the GSPC, calls for the achievement of 16 targets by 2020. Target 1, “An Online Flora of all known plants”, will summarize information on the ca. 400,000 known species of vascular plants and bryophytes—information that is currently scattered in a wide variety of floristic and monographic works, both printed “legacy” publications and online digital resources.

The WFO project is organized and coordinated by the WFO Council, which formed at a WFO workshop held at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., on 17–18 July 2012. The first meeting of the WFO Council was held at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 14–15 November 2013. The most recent, second meeting of the WFO Council, was held at the Koma-rov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 26–27 June 2014. The WFO Council currently comprises 22 member institutions or projects that have signed the Memorandum of Understanding and committed to the goals of the WFO: the MoU is available on the WFO website at: http://www.plants2020.net/wfo_mou/. Member-ship of the WFO Council remains open and signature of the MoU is expected for those institutions that wish to participate on the Coun-cil, but neither membership nor signature of the MoU is required for institutions or individuals to contribute content to the WFO.

It is anticipated that assembly of content and review of the clas-sification used for the WFO will be a combined effort of compiling published materials via protocols established by the WFO Technical

Working Group, as well as by working networks for all plant orders being coordinated by the WFO Taxonomic Working Group. Instruc-tions for Contributors, which will lay out and describe the format for information that will be presented for each taxon, will be available on the WFO website in the near future at: http://www.worldflora online.org. Data presented in the WFO will be fully and clearly attributed to the providers.

The WFO traces its roots to earlier efforts to meet the goals of the first phase of the GSPC from 2002 to 2010, with its original Target 1 of “A widely accessible working list of known plant species, as a step towards a complete world Flora”. This was addressed by publication of version 1.0 of “The Plant List”, a cooperative efforts of ten institutions to compile a working list of all plant species: http://www.theplantlist.org. Version 1.1 of “The Plant List” was published in September 2013, incorporating many revisions. These efforts will help to serve as the basis for a classification backbone for the WFO. Data ingestion of published Floras and monographs is underway at multiple sites, and more than one hundred thousand descriptions have now been ingested. Several families have been completed or nearly so in prototype format.

Both working groups are continuing to develop informative materials and these will soon be posted on the World Flora Online website at: http://www.plants2020.net/world_flora/. The next meet-ing of the WFO Council will be held in early 2015 in Geneva, Swit-zerland.

James S. Miller,1 William Wayt Thomas,2 Mark Watson,3 David Simpson4 & Peter Wyse Jackson1 1 Missouri Botanical Garden2 New York Botanical Garden3 Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh4 Royal Botanic Gardens, KewAuthor for correspondence: J.S. Miller, james.miller@mobot.org

Version of Record (identical to print version). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.12705/634.35

Participants of the World Flora Online Council Meeting, St. Petersburg, Russia, 26–27 June 2014: Top Row, Mikhail Ignatov, MHA; Chuck Miller, MO; Thomas Borsch, B; Melissa Tulig, NY; Alan Paton, K; Paul Wilkin, K. Second Row, Haining Qin, PE; Thomas Haevermans, P; Eduardo Dalcin, RB; Nicky Nicolson, K; William Wayt Thomas, NY; Katherine Willis, K; Marianne LeRoux, PRE; Roman Ufimov, LE. Third Row, Walter Berendsohn, B; Karol Marhold, SAV; Dmitry Geltman, LE; James S. Miller, MO. Front Row, Peter Wyse Jackson, MO; Visotheary Rivière-Ung, P; Mark Watson, E; Pierre-André Loizeau, G.