Josef Poelt

Josef Poelt was a botanist, bryologist and lichenologist. He held the chair in Systematic Botany and Plant Geography at the Free University of Berlin (1965–1972) and then was head of the Botanical Institute and Botanical Garden of Graz University, Austria (1972–1990).

Early life and education Josef Poelt was born in 1925 in the village of Pöcking in Bavaria, Germany, where his parents ran a guest house. He began to study botany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but he joined the German army and was assigned to an intelligence unit in Russia due to the start of the Second World War. After illness and time as a prisoner of war of the British, he returned to university study in 1946 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in natural sciences in 1950. Poelt was influenced by a botanist, H. Paul, to study non-flowering plants. He made use of the lichen herbarium at the university's botanic garden which contained nineteenth century specimens collected by Ferdinand Arnold and August von Krempelhuber. He later completed both his PhD (1950) and habilitation (1959) there.

Career He became an assistant at the botanic garden in Munich and from 1954 was curator of the cryptogam herbarium at the Botanische Staatssammlung München. In 1956 he started the edition of his first series Lichenes Alpium et regionum confinium distributed by the Botanische Staatssammlung München. It was followed by a number of exsiccatae distributed through the University of Graz, among them, starting in 1977, the series Reliquiae Petrakianae with plant material collected by Franz Petrak.

Publications Poelt published his first paper in 1950, and was an author or co-author of at least 400 publications. These included around 200 about lichens. His completion of a comprehensive account of the lichens of Austria was prevented by his sudden death.

Eight genera, including Poeltiaria, Poeltidea and the anagram Topelia, and 33 species have been named after him.

Personal life He married the mycologist Christa Meilhamer (1937–76) in 1959 and they had two children together. Poelt was an alpine mountaineer and good at yodelling.