Josef Poelt

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Josef Poelt
Born(1925-10-17)October 17, 1925
Pöcking
DiedJune 3, 1995(1995-06-03) (aged 69)
Graz
Nationality (legal) German-Austrian
Alma mater Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Scientific career
Institutions Free University of Berlin; University of Graz
Thesis On holarctic lobate Lecanora species
Doctoral advisors Karl Suessenguth
Doctoral students Burghard Hein
Author abbrev. (botany) Poelt

Josef Poelt was a botanist, bryologist and lichenologist. He held the chair in Systematic Botany and Plant Geography at the Free University of Berlin (1965 - 1972) and then was head of the Botanical Institute and Botanical Garden of Graz University, Austria (1972 - 1990). [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Josef Poelt was born in 1925 in the village of Pöcking in Bavaria, Germany, where his parents ran a guest house. He began to study botany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich but due to the start of the Second World War he joined the German army and was assigned to an intelligence unit in Russia. After illness and time as a prisoner of war of the British, [2] he returned to university study in 1946 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in natural sciences in 1950. [3] Poelt was influenced by a botanist, H. Paul, to study non-flowering plants. He made use of the lichen herbarium at the university's botanic garden which contained nineteenth century specimens collected by Ferdinand Arnold and August von Krempelhuber. He later completed both his PhD (1950) and habilitation (1959) there. [4]

Career

He became an assistant at the botanic garden in Munich and from 1954 was curator of the cryptogam herbarium at the Botanische Staatssammlung München. [3] [4] In 1965, Poelt was appointed to the chair in Systematic Botany and Plant Geography at the Free University of Berlin to lead a new research institute. He was able to recruit staff, including Christian Leuckert, and install new facilities including for chemotaxonomy of lichens. He moved to the chair in Systematic Botany at the University of Graz in Austria in 1972. This was in part to be away from student unrest in Berlin. [3] He was able to develop an international centre for cryptogam biology that included visiting researchers, an extensive herbarium and training programmes. He retired in 1990 but continued to work at University of Graz as an emeritus professor until his death in 1995. [3]

Poelt specialised in the taxonomy, morphology, evolution and biology of lichens, especially the areas of lichen biology, correlations between structure and function, and evolutionary trends in lichens. His work from 1950 onwards provided modern, detailed and practical descriptions of lichen species. As well as microscopic features he also made use of chemical characteristics to circumscribe species. [3] He made a significant contribution to the taxonomy of the Lecanoraceae, Physciaceae and the Teloschistaceae, as well as several other taxa. He also provided insights into the vegetative reproductive structures of lichens, described lichens that live on mosses (muscicolous species) and investigated species with cyanobacteria photobionts. [3] He improved knowledge of parasitic lichens from that of vague and poorly understood organisms to where their biological and ecological strategies and characters were described clearly and he identified many new taxa with this parasitic habit. Others often sent him samples of lichens for advice about identification. [4] He also travelled widely to see lichens in the field, including to Brazil, Costa Rica, Greenland, Tierra del Fuego, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal as well as all round Europe. [3] In addition he had a very broad knowledge of general plant systematics and floristics. [1] Poelt edited several exsiccatae. [5]

Publications

Poelt published his first paper in 1950, and was an author or co-author of at least 400 publications. These included around 200 about lichens. [4] The book Bestimmungsschlüssel europäischer Flechten was published in 1969, an important key for identification of European lichens, followed by several supplements (1977, 1981) that he prepared in collaboration with others. [6] His completion of a comprehensive account of the lichens of Austria was prevented by his sudden death. [3] He was also the author or co-author of at least 100 publications on bryophytes, vascular plants and fungi. [1]

Honours and awards

He was elected as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1982. He was made an honorary member of the Regensburg Botanical Society, the world's oldest botanical society and a foreign member of the Linnean Society of London. He was also an honorary corresponding member of the Botanical Society of America. [1] A festschrift was held to celebrate his birthday in 1985 when he was sixty. [3] In 1992 he was awarded the Acharius Medal by the International Association for Lichenology in recognition of his long and distinguished service to lichenology. [7]

Eight genera and 33 species have been named after him. [3]

Personal life

He married the mycologist Christa Meilhamer (1937–76) in 1959 and they had two children together. Poelt was an alpine mountaineer and good at yodelling. [3] [4]

Related Research Articles

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Lichenology is the branch of mycology that studies the lichens, symbiotic organisms made up of an intimate symbiotic association of a microscopic alga with a filamentous fungus. Lichens are chiefly characterized by this symbiosis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ferdinand Christian Gustav Arnold</span> German botanist and lichenologist (1828–1901)

Ferdinand Christian Gustav Arnold was a German lichenologist and taxonomist born in Ansbach, Bavaria. Even as a high school student he showed an active interest in botany: "Ich und August Gattinger ... durchstreiften von November 1846 bis zum Spätherbst 1847, Pflanzen sammelnd, die Landschaft von München nach allen Richtungen.".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Botanische Staatssammlung München</span> Herbarium

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Aino Marjatta Henssen, was a German lichenologist and systematist. Her father, Gottfried Henssen, was a folklorist and her mother was Finnish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Nicollon des Abbayes</span> French botanist, lichenologist and plant collector (1898–1974)

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Josef Hafellner is an Austrian mycologist and lichenologist. He was awarded the Acharius Medal in 2016 for his lifetime contributions to lichenology. Before his retirement, he was a professor at the Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz. Hafellner started developing an interest in lichens while he was a student at this institution, studying under Josef Poelt. He earned a master's degree in 1975 and a PhD in 1978, defending a doctoral thesis about the genus Karschia. In 2003, Hafellner received his habilitation. By this time, he had studied with French lichenologist André Bellemère (1927–2014) at Saint-Cloud, where he learned techniques of transmission electron microscopy and how their application in studying asci could be used in lichen systematics. His 1984 work Studien in Richtung einer natürlicheren Gliederung der Sammelfamilien Lecanoraceae und Lecideaceae has been described as "probably the single most influential publication in lichen systematics in the latter half of the 20th century".

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Helge Thorsten Lumbsch is a German-born lichenologist living in the United States. His research interests include the phylogeny, taxonomy, and phylogeography of lichen-forming fungi; lichen diversity; lichen chemistry and chemotaxonomy. He is the Associate Curator and Head of Cryptogams and Chair of the Department of Botany at the Field Museum of Natural History.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exsiccata</span> Published sets of preserved botanical specimens distributed with printed labels

Exsiccata is a work with "published, uniform, numbered set[s] of preserved specimens distributed with printed labels". Typically, exsiccatae refer to numbered collections of dried herbarium specimens or preserved biological samples published in several duplicate sets with a common theme or title, such as Lichenes Helvetici. Exsiccatae are regarded as scientific contributions of the editor(s) with characteristics from the library world and features from the herbarium world. Exsiccatae works represent a special method of scholarly communication. The text in the printed matters/published booklets is basically a list of labels (schedae) with information on each single numbered exsiccatal unit. Extensions of the concept occur.

Hannes Hertel is a German botanist and taxonomist and was Director of the State Herbarium in Munich, Germany 1992–2004. His specialist areas are the fungi and lichens.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Acharius Medallists Josef Poelt". International Association for Lichenology. Archived from the original on 2007-03-11. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  2. ↑ Mayerhofer, Helmut; Hafellner, Josef; Scheuer, Christian (1996). "Josef POELT (1924-1995)" (PDF). Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein für Steiermark. 126: 11–15.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Hertel, H; Nimis, PL; Vezda, A (1996). "A tribute to Josef Poelt (1925 - 1995)". The Lichenologist. 28 (2): 183–187. doi:10.1006/lich.1996.0016. S2CID   84249983.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Poelt, Josef (1924-1995)". Global Plants. JSTOR. Retrieved 5 October 2022.
  5. ↑ Triebel, D. & Scholz, P. 2001–2024 IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae. – Botanische Staatssammlung München: http://indexs.botanischestaatssammlung.de. – München, Germany.
  6. ↑ Hawksworth, D L (1982). "Bestimmungsschlüssel europäischer Flechten. Ergänzungsheft II. By J. Poelt and A. Věczda. [Bibliotheca Lichenologica no. 26.]". The Lichenologist. 14 (1): 102–103. doi:10.1017/S0024282982000218. S2CID   84953107 . Retrieved 5 October 2022.
  7. ↑ "Acharius Medallists". International Association for Lichenology. Retrieved 21 September 2022.
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