Talk:Natalie Whitford Uhl

Missing stuff
I deleted a bunch of stuff to bring this person in line with the other taxonomists. I'm a bit familiar with her work, am missing salient details. Her main claim to fame in taxonomy was acting as second editor for the 1983 Genera Palmarum: its infrageneric taxonomical interpretation was the standard in the early 1990s, although DNA work soon invalidated much. She's credited for the 2nd edition in 2008, but I do have to question how involved she actually was. Also importantly, she ran the IUCN palm specialist group in the 1990s, at least regarding the Americas. I believe the red list assessments from South America from those times are mostly hers: they mostly haven't stood the test of time well, because we know much more now -plants which were stated to be rare just turned out to be under-collected and unstudied, and other plants turned out to be much rarer than thought. The group also wasn't reading non-English papers in some cases, nor bothered visiting South American institutions, which made some assessments bad even for the time. She did visit South America a number of times in an IUCN capacity: workshops & stuff. This, and editor of Principes, is all I can remember of Uhl. Leo Breman (talk) 15:53, 13 October 2020 (UTC)