New book on Nebraska flora helps celebrate Sandoz's birthday

The book is “Flora of Nebraska,” published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and regarded as one of the most comprehensive ever produced on Nebraska plants. It has nearly 1,000 pages and includes detailed descriptions and distribution maps for all native and introduced Nebraska plants growing outside cultivation.

Making the book more special to western Nebraska residents is the fact that one of the authors is Steven Rolfsmeier, who has worked on the book part-time for about 15 years and has been associated with the High Plains Herbarium at Chadron State the past four years.

While attending the University of Nebraska in the late 1980s, Rolfsmeier was an employee and later a student of the principal author, Robert Kaul, a retired UNL botany professor and now research professor and curator of botany at the University of Nebraska State Museum, Lincoln.

Rolfsmeier said he wrote six of the approximately 100 chapters in the book and produced a high percentage of the nearly 2,000 maps.

Dr. Ron Weedon, professor of biology at Chadron State, said the fact that Rolfsmeier has lived and worked in western Nebraska in recent years helped the region gain greater representation in the new volume than it would have had otherwise.

Rolfsmeier said about 2,000 plants are described in the book. He added that because of its rather stable elevation, Nebraska has a smaller assortment of plants than most states in the United States. But he noted that the new publication contains information on about 300 more plants than were included in the last book of its kind, “Flora of the Great Plains,” which was printed in 1986.

About 60 percent of the additional plants were in the state all along, Rolfsmeier said, but went undetected. Many others, he said, are weedy plants that have been imported into the state in recent years.

Weedon added that Rolfsmeier has made a great contribution to the Chadron State herbarium, which the CSC professor has built into the second largest in Nebraska and is the largest possessed by any school in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. It had fewer than 2,400 specimens when Weedon came to the college in 1971 and now has 54,000.

“Because of his work here, Steven Rolfsmeier has given the High Plains Herbarium a 20-year jump into the future,” Weedon said. “His work has given us a level of quality delightfully far beyond where I could ever have imagined.”

Besides adding plants to the collection, Rolfsmeier updated the data base where the plants are indexed and gave them what Weedon describes as “the best possible indentification.”

Weedon recalled that Dr. Sam Rankin, president emeritus at CSC, once told him not to be bashful about telling people that the college has a world-class herbarium.

“Thanks to Steve, I can now say that with a straight face,” Weedon noted.

Weedon also noted that Rolfsmeier’s wife, Susan, has made a similar contribution while serving as an archivist at the Sandoz Center while the couple lived in Chadron. They will be moving to Manhattan, Kan., this summer so she can begin working on a doctorate at Kansas State University. Included in his plans is helping update the new book, even though it has been off the presses only a month.

Just 1,000 copies were printed and a third of them already have been sold. It is anticipated than a revised edition will be published within five years.

Copies of “Flora in Nebraska” are on sale at the Sandoz Center. They are $60 each.

 

Photo Information:

Dr. Ron Hartman, curator of the Rocky Mountain Herbarium at the University of Wyoming, and Dr. Ron Weedon, curator of the High Plains Herbarium at Chadron State College, are shown with Steven Rolfsmeier on Friday night celebrating the publication of “Flora of Nebraska.” Rolfsmeier, who has lived in Chadron the past four years, was one of the authors of the 1,000-page volume.