Antonín Vězda

Antonín (Toni) Vězda (25 November 1920 – 10 November 2008) was a Czech lichenologist. After completing a university education that was postponed by World War II, Vězda taught botany at the Czech University of Life Sciences. In 1958, he was dismissed from his university position as a result of the restrictions placed on academic freedoms by the communist regime in power. He eventually was hired as a lichen researcher by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, who allowed him to work from his apartment, which served also as an office and herbarium.

Vězda was a productive worker, publishing nearly 400 scientific papers between 1948 and 2008, most solitarily, describing hundreds of new taxa, and building up a herbarium collection of more than 300,000 specimens. He was praised for his series of exsiccates – sets of dried herbarium specimens – assembled with both local species as well as samples sent to him from colleagues throughout the world. Known as an outstanding taxonomist, he was awarded an Acharius Medal in 1992 for his lifetime contributions to lichenology. Two genera and twenty-four species have been named in honour of Vězda.

Biography Vězda was born in Brno on 25 November 1920. His father, a printer, was interested in horticulture and mycology, which may have helped spur an early interest in natural history. Vězda qualified to enter university in 1940, but the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II made it impossible for him to study. In 1945 he became an assistant to Alois Zlatník (dendrologist in the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague) and at the same time began study of natural history at Masaryk University in Brno. He earned two diplomas, in science and in forestry, from this institution in 1947. In 1951 he completed a diploma in forestry engineering at the Agricultural University as a forest engineer, and started teaching forest botany at this institution. Vězda, like many other academics at that time, was dismissed from university for political reasons in 1958, as they were considered untrustworthy by the communist regime in power. With his academic freedoms thus restricted, while Lichenes selecti exsiccati became one of the largest exsiccata ever issued, with around 2500 specimens;

Known as one of the best lichen taxonomists, Vězda had a prolific output as a scientist, publishing 376 scientific papers between 1948 and 2008. About 70% of these papers were published solitarily; when he did have co-authors, they were most often Josef Poelt, William W. Malcolm, and Klaus Kalb. He named 478 taxa, including 2 families (Protothelenellaceae , and Solorinellaceae ), 38 genera, and 399 species, and several taxa at various other ranks. He also proposed 282 new combinations. In the year before his death, Vězda published a summary of the new species he and coauthors described between 1958 and 2007.

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