Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the overwhelming support and cooperation from thousands of floristic and taxonomic specialists and others who have contributed in various ways and in varying degrees toward the development of this work. Through their cooperation for nearly five decades, they have helped make possible the first digital flora for the continent. In order to recognize fully their individual efforts, I have attempted to thank each of them, and although much care was taken to attempt to include all participants, doubtless, I may have missed a few, to whom I offer my most sincere apology. I am deeply indebted to my late sister Rosemarie for her countless hours of labor with every aspect of data entry for the first edition of the Checklist (Kartesz and Kartesz, 1980), from which I have drawn heavily to complete the second edition, and this current work. The preparation of this work could not have been accomplished without ready access to extensive library materials in both public and private collections. I am deeply indebted to the following libraries and institutions, which have provided the majority of the essential reference materials: Libraries at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis; the Library of the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx; West Virginia University Main Library, Morgantown; Davis Library of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Botany Library of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Library at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Fort Worth; the Library of Duke University, Durham; and the Library of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis. Many smaller institutions were the source of specialized references, to which I would like to express my sincere thanks to the staff for their cooperation. Of equal importance to BONAP has been the free access to many herbaria and museum collections. In this regard, I would like to thank the curators of the following institutions: University of California at Berkeley and the Jepson Herbarium, the Harvard University Herbaria, the Herbarium at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Smithsonian Institution, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the New York Botanical Garden, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the West Virginia University Herbarium, Ohio State University, Duke University, the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama, the University of Tennessee, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Texas A&M University, the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the Nevada State Museum, and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. I should also like to thank the entire BONAP staff, both current and past, for their contributions toward the TDC. In particular, I should thank Misako Nishino for her decades of dedication to the project. Without her specialized skills in assessing taxonomic problems, and careful data entry and management, the project could not have been completed. She represents the backbone of BONAP, and has made indispensable contributions to many of our projects. Also indispensable to BONAP is David Maliken. His efforts in tracking and acquiring thousands of rare and essential references have been fundamental to our effort. I am also very grateful to Robert Coxe for his efforts in assessing morphological data and assisting with the building of polyclave data. Thanks also go to Matthew Smith, for his decades of dedication to BONAP and for his scientific contributions, including the development of much of our Maryland and Virginia floristic data. The efforts of many individuals working at remote locations also deserve great praise. Gregory J. Schmidt of the NRCS, has served as BONAP's GIS expert for nearly a decade and has produced many of the spectacularly colorful, and unique maps displayed on our website. Greg has also been instrumental in helping with our photographic processing and displays, and for assisting with the APG taxonomy. The superb computer programming skills of Andrey Shcherbakov, our Russian colleague, has enabled us to present our data in the most proficient and efficient manner possible. Early in this project, my concern was; given the enormous quantity of BONAP's data, would it be possible to display them quickly? Given Andrey's creative and expert programming abilities, he produced a website, not only with rapid response time, but also one that is easy to use, fully interactive and one with some of the most advanced search-sort capabilities on the web. We are enormously grateful to him for his tireless assistance. Certainly not to be overlooked is the endless support and assistance from my great friends:
Finally, I cannot pay enough tribute to the hundreds of individual floristicians and other botanists throughout the world who have contributed extensively to this work. Many have spent thousands of hours reviewing maps and manuscripts. Therefore, it is only fitting to list as many of them as I can recall and thank each for their contributions. I have arranged the first group of these individuals for providing distributional information, the second group for providing taxonomic and nomenclatural data, and the third group, in this case instutitions, for providing vouchering contributions.For nearly the entire duration of the project, they have helped by either checking specimen identifications, acquiring rare publications, or providing extremely useful and imaginative ideas towards the development of our website. Several former BONAP employees also played key roles in developing the database foundation, from which the TDC was developed. Carolyn Wilczynski was essential, providing data entry and additional help necessary for completing earlier editions of our work. -JTK | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||