American bryologist. Although principally known for his work on arctic mosses and liverworts, William Campbell Steere had an early interest in tropical bryology and also published work on the Rubiaceae. He was the grandson of Joseph Beal Steere, the nineteenth-century traveller and professor of zoology and paleontology at the University of Michigan, who as a young man had collected in the Amazon, Peru, and Ecuador.

After completing his BA at the University of Michigan, Steere started graduate work in cytology at Temple University, but mid-way through his studies accepted an invitation from his former teacher, Harley Bartlett, to teach in the Department of Botany at the University of Michigan, and so completed his MA (1931) and PhD (1932) at Ann Arbor under Bartlett's supervision. His dissertation was on the chromosomal behaviour of triploid Petunia hybrids, but later most of his research was concerned with bryology, although he published a few papers on cytology and on botanical exploration and other subjects. He rose steadily in the department: assistant professor in 1936, associate professor in 1942, full professor in 1946, and in 1947 succeeded Bartlett as chairman of the department.

In 1950 he accepted a professorship at Stanford University, eventually becoming Dean of the Graduate Division. On his first day there, as he and his wife were moving into their house on campus, he discovered a new species of moss in their front yard, which he named Tortula standfordensis Steere. Editor of Bryologist from 1938 until 1954, Steere is credited with saving it from financial ruin and transforming it into a respected scientific journal. He was also an editor for the Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, the American Journal of Botany, and Evolutionary Biology. In 1954-1955, he served as the first programme director for Systematic Biology at the National Science Foundation.

Early in his career Steere made a series of extensive field expeditions in Latin America. In 1932 he participated in a biological survey of the Mayan region of the Yucatán, the first bryologist to conduct fieldwork in the neotropics. And where previously only 11 species of bryophytes were known, Steere found 42, two of them new to science. In 1939 he exchanged jobs for a year with Francisco Pagán, Professor of Botany at the University of Puerto Rico, which gave him the chance to do extensive collecting in a tropical area. He used every break from his teaching to collect in the countryside, covering the island thoroughly, by foot or by car. His plans for a book on Puerto Rican moss, the first moss flora for tropical America, were put on hold until 1957 when one of his students at Stanford, Howard Crum, took up the project and finished the keys and descriptions.

In 1942, at the instigation of Harley Bartlett, a cinchona mission to South America was assembled under the Board of Economic Warfare, with the purpose of finding wild sources of quinine-yielding bark of the cinchona tree. Earlier that year the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies had cut off the primary source of quinine for U.S. troops. In October the first field party, consisting of Steere and F.R. (Ray) Fosberg, left for Guatemala and from there to Colombia. They found an abundance of Cinchona officinalis L., C. pubescens Vahl, C. pitayensis Wedd., and Remijia pedunculata (H. Karst.) Flueck., another rich source of alkaloids, so that in July 1943 Steere was able to move on to Ecuador, where he was joined by some of his close colleagues, Wendell H. Camp, William B. Drew, Gerald Prescott, Ira L.Wiggins, F. Marion Ownbey, by the Ecuadorean botanist Misael Acosta-Solis, and B.F. Wallis, a geologist with many years experience of the country. His colleagues nicknamed him "Bull Steere" for his ability to push himself through rough terrain and tangled vegetation. By 1944, the mission had gathered enough quinine to treat malaria in the armed forces for two years. Furthermore, each botanist had found the time to make collections in his own speciality. Much later, in the summer of 1952 on the Sefton-Stanford Expedition to the Gulf of California, Steere had the opportunity to study endemism and the special adaptations of mosses and hepatics in the desert areas of western Mexico.

Steere first visited the Arctic in 1948. After the war there was a lot of interest in radioactive materials, and Bartlett had the idea of sending a field party led by Steere into an area of natural radiation (the Eldorado Mine at Port Radium in Canada's Northwest Territories) to study the effects of constant exposure to low level radiation on plants. Not surprisingly, the field party, which included Edwin A.Phillips, Robert J. Lowry, Hansford T Schacklette, and James Kucyniak, found positive evidence that long exposure to natural radioactivity leads to an increased rate and accumulation of mutations. The following year Steere went to central Alaska and St Lawrence Island with the U.S. Geological Survey, which was studying the role of vegetation in the development of permafrost and other geomorphic processes. His own arctic research, which stretched over many years, began in 1951 when Ira Wiggins, then Director of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow, suggested he make a systematic survey of the bryophytes of arctic Alaska, which had never before been visited by a bryologist. As a result of his extensive fieldwork and research, he correctly postulated the existence of a circum-high-arctic flora and that large areas of northern Alaska had escaped glaciation. He also spent a season in Greenland at the Danish Arctic Station on Disco Island, several weeks in Iceland in 1964, and the winter of 1965 at McMurdo Station on Ross Island in Antarctica.

In 1959 Steere left Stanford to become Director of the New York Botanical Gardens, at a low point in its history, when it was near bankruptcy. He was responsible for convincing the National Science Foundation that the Garden's collections were deserving of government support and managed to secure the first of the Facilities Grants, which have been vital in financing the day-to-day operations of most of the large herbaria and natural history museums in the United States. In 1972 he resigned from his executive responsibilities but stayed on as Senior Scientist, retiring officially at the end of 1977 to become Senior Scientist and President Emeritus at the Garden and Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Steere received many honours and accolades, including three honorary degrees, from the Universities of Michigan, Montreal, and Alaska, and The Order of the Sacred Treasure from Emperor Hirohito for his work on the US-Japan Cooperative Science Program. Mount Steere in Antarctica and four genera of bryophytes (Steereocolea R.M. Schust., Steerea S. Hatt. & Kamim., Steereella Kuwah., and Steereobryon G.L. Sm.) bear his name. Until about a month before his death, he was working on an annotated checklist of the mosses of Ecuador, a project he started during the cinchona mission and had resumed after his retirement.

Sources:
G.R. Brassard, 1989, "In Memoriam: William C. Steere, 1907-1989", Arctic and Alpine Research, 21(4): 435
W.R. Buck, 1989, "William Campbell Steere (1907-1989)", Taxon, 38(3): 532-534
H. Crum, 1977, "William Campbell Steere: An Account of his Life and Work", The Bryologist, 80: 662
D. Steere, 1987, Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 45: 1-18.