Biography

United States botanist. Emmet Judziewicz was born in Milwaukee in 1953 and earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin in 1987 under Hugh Iltis. He is an associate professor of biology and curator of the herbarium at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and was recently given a three year honorary research associate position at the United States National Herbarium.

One of his main research interests are the bamboos and basal grasses of Latin America's tropical rainforests. To study their relationships, he has made eight research trips to Latin America between 1981 and 2001, totalling nearly one year spent in Central America, Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, and Chile. His collaborations with plant scientists from Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, South Africa, and Denmark have resulted in the publication of two books and 32 papers on bamboo classification, evolution, anatomy, and morphology, including American Bamboos (1999) with Lynn G. Clark and Ximena Londoño. Another of his books, Grasses of the Guianas, a summary of the 400 species occurring in these countries, is the most comprehensive grass flora, to date, of any portion of northern South America.

In 2006 Dr Judziewicz visited herbaria in Paris, London, New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, to describe new species of the woody bamboo Aulonemia from isolated cloud forests in the Andes Mountains of South America and work on a grass checklist of Madagascar; and with Dr Sol Sepsenwol, he discovered and described the world's smallest bamboo, a species less than one inch tall from French Guiana. The endemic Costa Rican bamboo, Arthrostylidium judziewiczii Davidse, is named after him. His other area of interest has been the native plants of the Midwest, most recently as co-author of the field guide Wildflowers of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest (2007). He has worked particularly on the plants of islands in the Great Lakes such as the Apostle Islands and Isle Royale archipelagos. Several of these studies are book-length papers and are based on collections of over 10,000 plant specimens. His interest in these remote islands is motivated by the need to establish baseline "benchmark" data so that future floristic changes, whether caused by direct or indirect (climate change) human influence, can be documented.

Sources:
Personal communication, March 2008.