Dennis Eugene Breedlove

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Dennis Eugene Breedlove (September 14, 1939, Oakland, California – June 4, 2012) was an American botanist, herbarium curator, and plant collector. He is "best known for his collections and floristic studies in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and his ethnobotanical work in that state with various collaborators."[1][2]

Education and career

After graduating from St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in 1957,[3] Dennis Breedlove attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he graduated with an A.B. degree in 1962. In 1968 he graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D.[1] His doctoral dissertation, entitled "The systematics of Fuchsia section Encliandra (Onagraceae)", was written under the supervision of Peter H. Raven.[4] After briefly working as a research botanist at the University of California Botanical Garden on the Berkeley campus,[1]

Breedlove became in 1969 an assistant curator at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences herbarium.[5][6] For his entire career he was employed by the California Academy of Sciences, where he was promoted to associate curator, chaired the botany department, and retired as curator emeritus and a lifetime fellow.[5]

With the exception of brief collecting trips to Trinidad and the páramo in the Cordillera Oriental of Colombia, his field work was centered in western North America and northern Latin America. Research on plants of California and Nevada (especially in the Sweetwater Mountains on the border be-tween these states), Mexico (especially Chiapas, the Sierra Surutato in Sinaloa, and the peninsula of Baja California), and Guatemala led him on numerous collecting trips.[1]

In 1960, he began working with ethnographer, anthropologist, and linguist Robert M. Laughlin to compile a comprehensive ethnobotanical inventory of the plants known to the Tzotzils living in the municipality of Zinacantán in the highlands Chiapas.[5]

From hundreds of Tzotzil names for plant varieties they eventually identified 30 genera and 1,484 species, published in the volume The Flowering of Man: A Tzotzil Botany of Zinacantán (2000, previously published in 1993 as two volumes in Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology).[5]

In 1964, Breedlove (who could speak Tzeltal Mayan), Brent Berlin, and Peter H. Raven began 10 years of ethnobotanical research among the Tzeltals and other Maya peoples in the highlands of Chiapas.[7] Their 660-page book Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification was published in 1974 with a paperback reprint in 2013.[8]

San Francisco Botanical Garden's Apulca pines, which can grow to over 45 meters, were grown from seed brought back to San Francisco by Breedlove in 1986.[9]

His more than 72,000 sets of collections consisted of vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens, fungi, insects, snails, and reptiles. He collected seeds of plants from higher elevations in Chiapas and Oaxaca that led to the establishment of the New World Cloud Forest at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Some of the species that he brought back from Chiapas for cultivation (e.g., Deppea splendens, Magnolia sharpii, Symplocos hartwegii, and S. tacanensis) are now either very rare or presumed extinct in the wild.[10]

Deppea splendens[11] is a synonym of Csapodya splendens.[12]

In 1968, a species of lizard Anolis breedlovei (junior synonym of Anolis cuprinus) was named in honor of Dennis Breedlove.[13]

Selected publications

Articles

Books
The standard author abbreviation Breedlove is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[14]

References

  1. ^
    ISSN 0040-0262
    .
  2. doi:10.1086/412871
    .
  3. ^ "The Legacy of Botanist Dennis Breedlove '57: San Francisco's MesoAmerican Cloud Forest". Saint Joseph Notre Dame, SJND News. March 12, 2014. Archived from the original on November 21, 2020. Retrieved November 16, 2020.
  4. ^ Breedlove, Dennis Eugene (1968). The systematics of Fuchsia section Encliandra (Onagraceae). Stanford University Libraries (Thesis). (See Fuchsia.)
  5. ^ a b c d "Breedlove, Dennis Eugene". JSTOR Global Plants.
  6. S2CID 52827153
    .
  7. ^ "Friends/BG Co-sponsor Breedlove Talk" (PDF). Botanical Garden Quarterly, University of California Berkeley. 1 (2): 5. Fall 1977.
  8. ISBN 9781483220987; pbk reprint of 1974 original{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link
    )
  9. ^ "Featured Plant: Pinus pseudostrobus var. apulcensis". San Francisco Botanical Garden.
  10. ^ Bartholomew, Bruce (Fall 1977). "Plants from the mountains of Mexico" (PDF). Botanical Garden Quarterly, University of California Berkeley. 1 (2): 1 & 7.
  11. ^ "Our Work, Deppea splendens". California Academy of Sciences.
  12. ^ "Deppea splendens". The Plant List.
  13. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5
    . ("Breedlove", p. 38).
  14. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Breedlove.

External links

Data related to Dennis Breedlove at Wikispecies

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