Colorado Flora: Western Slope, Fourth Edition A Field Guide to the Vascular Plants

Acknowledgments

xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Our exploration of the Colorado flora has been a cooperative enterprise, involving both field and herbarium work and spanning more than half a century. So many of our students, foreign visitors, and specialists have given invaluable aid that it is impossible to name them all. We have learned from each other, and it is difficult to sort out the mentors and the mentored. We are indebted to those who have alerted us to new specimen records and who have reported errors in earlier versions of our books and papers. Thank you all. David Cooper, wetland ecologist of Colorado, the western USA, and the Peruvian alpine, has opened our eyes to the riches of calcareous and iron fens that are yielding new records. That was a neglected phase of Colorado’s flora, and his work alerted us to the rich bryophyte flora as well as vascular plants. Those specialists who have contributed their keys or whose excerpted ones we have used are acknowledged in the text. Special thanks are extended to George Argus for his help on Salix, Rich Scully for Potentilla and Lamiaceae, Steve O’Kane for his keys to Physaria, and the moonwort team of Don Farrar and Steve Popovich for providing the latest treatment of Botrychium. We also thank Tim Hogan and Nan Lederer, who for the past ten years have been indispensable managers of the COLO herbarium. Their development of the specimen database of the COLO collections and county checklists is much appreciated. A special kudos to my junior author, Ron Wittmann, whose career has been in Boulder as a physicist with the National Institute for Standards and Technology. In the 1970s Ron came to the herbarium as an amateur botanist and gardener with a few plants that needed identification . He had taken a course in plant taxonomy under C. Leo Hitchcock at the University of Washington. Since that beginning, Ron has developed a unique skill in recognizing the Colorado flora in all of its aspects—vascular plants, lichens, and bryophytes. In my declining years he has become my arms and legs, daring to scale steep slopes, scorning cold-weather clothing, casting aside his hand lens and using his twenty-power eyes to discover rare bryophytes . For the present edition Ron has been the computer guru. Bill Weber has done the leg work in the herbarium and handled much of the correspondence. He was not allowed to touch the keys to use two fingers to type the manuscript. Our joint effort has included some crucial discussions, Ron approaching problems with the precision of a professional physicist against Bill’s more romantic approach and taxonomic experience. We never came to blows, and our partnership has been truly fruitful. In the final stages of preparing the manuscript my daughter Linna Weber Müller-Wille, my son-in-law Ludger Müller-Wille, and my grandson Ragnar Müller-Wille offered editorial help and made constructive comments on the introductory sections of the flora. W. A. Weber (bill) r. C. WittmAnn (ron) February 2012 ...