S. F. Smith
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Name
Stephen F. Smith
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Dates
- 09 Feb 2012
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Specialities
Begoniaceae
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Roles
Author, Determiner, Collector
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Movement Details
Brazil, United States of America, Peru
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Notes
From email dated 10 Feb 2012 from Warren Wagner (herb. US):
It is with great sadness that we report the death yesterday evening of Steve Smith who worked in the US National Herbarium for close to thirty years. Steve was diagnosed with melanoma several years ago and despite aggressive medical procedures that provided a period of remission during which he continued to work, he decided several weeks ago to retire as he no longer felt well enough to continue. Steve played a very important role in the national herbarium by regularly checking published revisions and monographs to annotate or update the names on our specimens, by identifying unnamed collections especially those from southern Brazil, Begonias, and tropical plants for which we had no research expertise, and by distributing or filing the many mounted specimens that are constantly being added to the herbarium. For the past decade Steve continued with all of this curation work, but also worked with Paul Peterson in the grass collection and processing backlog grass specimens.
His association with the herbarium and Smithsonian goes back to his youth as he was the youngest son of Lyman B. Smith who began working as a curator in the US National Herbarium in 1947. Despite this pedigree, Steve had a broader interest in biology. He received a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation on the ecology of chipmunks. Throughout his career at NMNH he was an avid birder and regularly participated in Christmas Bird Counts, including 2011. Early in his botanical career Steve was a coauthor of the National list of scientific plant names (1982) published by the USDA. He also published novelties or combinations in neotropical Begonia (Begoniaceae), Croton (Euphorbiaceae), and Tapeinostemon (Gentianaceae). His most recent publication was as a coauthor of a checklist of the grasses for the Catalogue of seed plants of the West Indies (2012).
Those of us who worked with Steve will remember him fondly. Those of us who use the collections in the US National Herbarium will also think about him often as we recognize his ubiquitous handwriting on the covers and specimens in the herbarium.
_____________________________
Warren L. Wagner
Chair and Curator of Pacific Botany
Department of Botany, MRC-166
Smithsonian Institution
P. O. Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012 -
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