Research

Taxonomy and floristics of North American Poaceae, Cyperaceae, and Juncaceae; wetland plants

Growing up on a farm in northeast Utah, Stephan developed a lifelong passion for plants, especially the grasses.  He received his B.S. in Range Science and a M.S. in Botany from Utah State University.  Stephan completed his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University working on the genus Sporobolus under the guidance of Frank W. Gould.  Following Gould’s retirement, Stephan took over as Curator, and later Director, of the S.M. Tracy Herbarium where he oversaw significant growth in the herbarium’s holdings across all taxonomic groups. 

Stephan has published numerous papers on various aspects of grass systematics.  In addition, he has co-authored several books on grass and range plant identification including: Grasses of Texas Gulf Prairies and Marshes, several editions of both Texas Range Plants and North American Range Plants/North American Wildland Plants, Grasses of the Great Plains, and most recently Field Guide to Common Texas Grasses.

As a long-time member of the Society for Range Management, he mentored countless undergraduate students as both a coach of the TAMU Plant Team and later by preparing the test specimens for the Undergraduate Plant Contest conducted at the SRM’s Annual Meeting

In 2017 Stephan retired after nearly 40 years of research and teaching at Texas A&M University.  Now retired, he is still a frequent face at the herbarium where he continues to work on revisions of previous works and developing new research themes focused on grasses and plants in general.

Texas flora; bog and outcrop plants; cultivated plants

Monique declared at an early age that she wanted to be a tree when she grew up because, “trees are nicer than people.”  Thwarted in this ambition, she earned her B.S. in Floriculture from Texas A&M in 1985.  Since then, she has been associated with Texas A&M’s Biology Department as a Technical Laboratory Coordinator for undergraduate courses in Botany, Biology, and Zoology.  She earned a Master’s degree in Botany in 1997.  Her thesis, Manual of the Angiosperm Flora of Brazos and Surrounding Counties, is still in use for regional plant identification. She was Herbarium Botanist for the Biology Department’s Herbarium (TAMU) from 1985 until its merger with the TAES collection in 2012.

Her interests include education in the biological sciences, herbarium management, and the Texas flora.  She has a particular fondness for bog and outcrop plants, dye plants, and the genus Agalinis, in which she, and Judith Canne-Hilliker, described a new species in 1993.  She has published several papers on the Texas Flora and was a co-author for the Illustrated Flora of East Texas, Volume One.

Mycology; Agaricales; floristics of southeastern U.S. fungi, especially Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida

David is a retired chemist and mycologist with a B.S. and M.S. from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.  His 1978 thesis, Agaricales of Southeast Texas,was focused on a study of macro-fungi of the East Texas Piney-Woods ecoregion.  

From 2006 to 2018, he was the Fungal TWIG leader (coordinator for mycologists) for the Big Thicket National Preserve’s All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory. He has also been president of the Gulf States Mycological Society since 1998.  David has authored numerous papers related to mycology, and published several new species of macro-fungi, and has four macro-fungi named after him. In 2009, he received The North American Mycological Association’s award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology, and in 2010, received the R.E. Jackson Conservation Award from the Big Thicket Association. With Alan and Arleen Bessette, he co-authored Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States-A Field Guide to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, which was released in July of 2019.

The fungi collections housed at the S.M. Tracy Herbarium are in large part attributed to Dave’s life-long efforts to document and describe the macro-fungi of the Gulf Coast, especially in East Texas and the Big Thicket National Preserve.