| BEN |
| BOTANICAL ELECTRONIC NEWS |
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| ISSN 1188-603X |
| No. 449 February 14, 2012 | aceska@telus.net | Victoria, B.C. |
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Leslie David Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1936. Following a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1957, he earned a Master's degree from Oregon State University in 1965, where he studied hybridization between species of manzanita (Arctostaphylos) in southwestern Oregon. His PhD at the University of Michigan in 1969 examined patterns of diversity and mechanisms of speciation in Stephanomeria. He then joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at the University of California, Davis where he taught classes in genetics and evolutionary biology, and served as department chair for three years during the mid-1980s.
Gottlieb researched a broad array of subjects including plant speciation, polyploidy, biochemical evolution of isozymes and molecular genetics. He will be long remembered as a pioneer and strong advocate for the application of biochemical andmolecular data to plant systematics. Many of his studies dealt with rare and endangered species, particularly in the genera Clarkia and Stephanomeria. He also wrote the Flora of North America treatment of Stephanomeria.
Gottlieb published more than 120 research papers and received a number of awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985), Alumni Association Fellow of Oregon State University (1993), and the Botanical Society of America Merit Award (2000) and Centennial Fellow Award (2006). In 2004, Leslie and his wife Vera Ford Gottlieb retired from UC Davis to Ashland, Oregon. He was active in the Native Plant Society of Oregon, and served as Chair of the Rare and Endangered Plants Committee. He passed away on January 31, 2012, from the complications of pancreatic cancer. He was 75.
In the November 2011 issue of the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, I described the new Oregon species Erigeron stanselliae, a member of the sunflower family Asteraceae. Erigeron is a large genus, in which there are already 40 species known to occur in the state. The new species has been found at only two sites in coastal Curry County. It was collected as early as the 1970s and 1980s, but was misidentified then as a subspecies of the well known species E. eatonii Gray. In 2009, I asked Veva Stansell, one of the original discoverers of the plant, to lead me to a known locality at Flycatcher Springs, about 13 km SE of Gold Beach. My collections from there permitted a detailed morphological comparison with other taxa of the "Erigeron eatonii-complex," especially in Humboldt and Trinity Counties, California (Chambers 2011). I was able to separate the Curry County plants from their 4 nearest relatives by minor but taxonomically important features of 1) head size, 2) degree of leafiness of the flower stem, 3) density of distal stem pubescence, and 4) presence of minute glandular trichomes on the heads. Also significant in this comparison was that the new species is limited to serpentine-derived (ultramafic) soils. The two known populations are only 5 km apart and are disjunct geographically from the 4 related taxa. I suggested that future field studies of serpentines in SW Oregon and NW California might discover more populations of this otherwise rare and highly localized species. It was a pleasure to name the plant in honor of Mrs. Stansell, whose vigorous field work over several decades has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the flora of SW Oregon and NW California.
Vegetation of the Czech Republic [editor: Milan Chytrý, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic] is a four-volume monograph which systematically summarizes the diversity of vegetation types in the Czech Republic. Czech vegetation is divided into 38 phytosociological classes, which are further divided into alliances and associations. Each of these vegetation units is characterized by a detailed description of its floristic composition, ecology, dynamics, distribution and economic or conservation value, including distribution maps and synoptic tables of species composition. Associations were delimited by formal definitions and tested using a set of approximately 100,000 vegetation plots contained in the Czech National Phytosociological Database. National vegetation classification is accompanied by a computer expert system for identification of associations. The monograph was developed by a team of botanists from the Department of Botany and Zoology, Masaryk University in cooperation with experts from the Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and other institutions.
This particular volume deals with aquatic and wetland vegetation, and covers plant communities that are distributed in many parts of the circumpolar floristic region outside the Czech Republic. Many wetland and especially aquatic plant communities covered in this volume occur throughout the northern hemisphere with either the same or homologous species composition. Because of this, the plant community classification suggested by the Czech and Moravian phytosociologists can be used as a framework for similar classification attempts elsewhere. For the table of contents of this volume see http://www.sci.muni.cz/botany/chytry/Vegetace-CR-3-Contents.pdf
The core summaries of Vegetation of the Czech Republic series were skilfully translated to English by Dr. Toby Spribille, and they make the book useful even for those who cannot read Czech. Summary phytosociological tables are written in a universal language that can be easily understood. Therefore, even if you can't read Czech, there is still a lot of material in this book that you will be able to understand. In addition, the classification of vegetation covered in these volumes is well summarized at http://www.sci.muni.cz/botany/vegsci/vegetace.php?lang=en
This is a remarkable book and a remarkable series.
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