Banner image: William Weber, a professor emeritus at CU Boulder, has received three lifetime achievement awards for his research on lichens and mosses. (Credit:ÌęAC Violet, CU Boulder Libraries)
William Weber claims a unique honor at his retirement community in Boulder: In the garden behind this complex is a species of lichen named after him.Ìę
Specimen ofÌęSaussurea weberi, a flowering plant named after William Weber. Credit: CU Museum of Natural History Herbarium
Weber, who will turn 100 in November, is a botanist and a professor emeritus at CU Boulder. His namesake lichen, Lecanora weberi, grows on a rock in the communityâs memorial garden. Itâs a seafoam-colored species with specks of orange.
The lichen is one of about 30 species named after Weber, who joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1946âfirst as a lecturer in biology and then as a curator in the Museum of Natural History. These âeponymsâ include Saussurea weberi, a rare plant with purple flowers from Colorado, and Metzgeria weberi, a liverwort from New Guinea.
Theyâre a testament to Weberâs decades of work spent scouring Colorado and far-flung locales, such as New Guinea and the GalĂĄpagos Islands, to find new flowering plants, mosses and lichens.Ìę
Another testament to the almost-centenarianâs career are the three lifetime achievement awards in botany that he received this summer. They include the Acharius Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Lichenology from the . The medal is the highest honor a scientist can receive for studying these strange organismsâin which fungi and single-celled algae or cyanobacteria work together to grow and thrive. Ìę
Erin Tripp, the current curator of botany at the Museum of Natural History, said that the awards are a well-deserved recognition for a decades-spanning career. Weber founded the museumâs herbarium collection, which today includes roughly 600,000 specimensâranging from colorful lilies to forest mushrooms.
âThere are very few human beings that have had the kind of expertise that he hasânot just in flowering plants, but in mosses and lichens, too,â said Tripp, also an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. âHeâs done everything.â
Weber, however, hasnât let the honors go to his head. âI take these things in stride,â he said.
William Weber (second from left) poses with other members of the Sialis Bird Club, a group he founded in New York City in the 1930s. Credit: W.A. Weber collection
Colorado to the Galapagos
Heâs had plenty of time to practice. The scientist was 5-years-old when his cousin, a naturalist himself, gave Weber his first microscope.
Botanist William Weber examines a specimen under a microscope.ÌęCredit: W.A. Weber collection
âI knew how to grow paramecium and amoebas, and I was spouting Latin names when I was this little tiny thing,â Weber said from an easy chair in his Boulder apartment.Ìę
As a child growing up in Manhattan, he rubbed shoulders with some of New York Cityâs most prominent naturalists. Famed botanist Elizabeth Gertrude Britton personally ejected Weber from a public garden after he tried to steal a leaf from a skunk cabbage for show-and-tell at his school. Ìę
He never lost that excitement for the natural world, said Tim Hogan, collections manager of botany at the Museum of Natural History.Ìę
âHe always had this little boy enthusiasm about plants,â said Hogan, who worked with Weber at the university. âHe would tell you, âCome here and look at this.ââ
Still, when Weber arrived at CU Boulder, it was no place for an avid botanist. The universityâs plant holdings at that time included fewer than 50,000 specimens. He convinced the then director of the museum to begin a real herbarium, which for years occupied half of an attic on campus, and set about collecting. Ìę
âI began to make a manuscript of the plants of the Flatirons, for example, then Boulder, County, then the state of Colorado and so on,â he said.
Weber covered a lot of ground before he retired from CU Boulder in 1990. The scientist studied and collected flowering plants, mosses and lichens from every continent except Africa. He spent a year in Sweden, searched for plants in the mountains of NepalÌęand was the first researcher to make an exhaustive study of the lichens of the GalĂĄpagos. As a result, researchers from around the world now turn to the CU Boulder herbarium to study the evolution and ecology of plants and other organisms, Tripp said.Ìę
William Weber (seated, center) poses with the three lifetime achievement awards he won this summer. From left to right: Frank Bungartz, collections manager of lichens at Arizona State University, Doug Ladd, president of the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, daughter Heather HarrisÌęand CU Boulder's Tim Hogan and Erin Tripp. Credit: Heidi Alina
âOur strength is Colorado, but for Dr. Weber, the herbarium was only meaningful when put into a global context because plants and fungi get around the world,â she said. The current team at the CU Boulder herbarium includes Tripp, Hogan and Dina Clark, also a collections manager of botany.Ìę
Today, Weber is fond of sharing stories about his globe-trotting adventures and his turn as Boris Kolenkhov, a Russian dancing master, in a local production of the play You Canât Take It with You. In May, he also Ìęusing his walker, which carried a sign reading â100 years young. Still going strong.â
Two species of lichen you may spot hiking in Colorado: Vulpicida pinastri (top) andÌęBryoria fuscescens (bottom).ÌęCredits: Ìęby Selso ; ÌębyÌęJerzy OpioĆa via
From plants to lichens
In addition to the Acharius Medal, which was awarded in July, Weber was the first-ever recipient in August of two honors from the . They were the Chicita Culberson Award for Lifetime Achievement in Lichenology and the Elizabeth Britton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Bryologyânamed after the same Elizabeth Britton who once kicked a young Weber out of a garden in New York.
Weber said what heâs most proud of about CU Boulderâs herbarium collectionâwhich like that lichen in his backyard, is now named after himâisnât its size but its diversity.Ìę
More than 40 percent of the specimens in the Museum of Natural Historyâs collection are mosses and lichens. They include Colorado species like the pale-footed horsehair lichen (Bryoria fuscescens), which grows like a ponytail on tree branches, and the powdered sunshine lichen (Vulpicida pinastri), which looks a bit like a small head of cabbage.Ìę
Casual hikers might not take note of these growths, but Weber said that lichen lineages are likely hundreds of millions of years old. By studying where and how lichens grow, scientists can learn a lot about how continents and life moved across the globe.Ìę
âI am proud of the fact that, unlike most herbaria that are [made up of] flowering plants, we have an excellent collection of fungi, lichens, algae,â Weber said. âThatâs what Iâm very proud to leave behind.â