Pier Andrea Saccardo in 1900

Pier Andrea Saccardo (23 April 1845 in Treviso, Treviso – 12 February 1920 in Padua) was an Italian botanist and mycologist. He was also the author of a color classification system that he called Chromotaxia. He was elected to the Linnean Society in 1916 as a foreign member. His multi-volume Sylloge Fungorum was one of the first attempts to produce a comprehensive treatise on the fungi which made use of the spore-bearing structures for classification.

Life

Saccardo was born in the wine growing region of Selva di Montello to Elena Vidotto and engineer Francesco di Selva. He studied at gymnasium of the Venice seminary, the Lyceum in Venice, and then at the Technical Institute of the University of Padua from 1864. Even at the age of fourteen, he had already put together a herbarium and had made collections of the insects of Treviso. He visited the Kew gardens in 1862. He received a doctorate in 1867 and in the same year married Eleonora Zava. He became an Assistant to Roberto de Visiani (1800-1878) an Italian botanist, naturalist and scholar.[1] Then in 1869, he became a professor of Natural History in Padua. In 1876 he established the mycological journal Michelia which published many of his early mycological papers. In 1879 he became a professor of Botany and director of the botanical gardens of the university until 1915. He accumulated around 70,000 fungal specimens encompassing over 18,500 different species for his herbarium now stored at the university.[2][3]

Pier Andrea Saccardo

Saccardo's scientific activity focused almost entirely on mycology. He wrote his first book in 1864 (when he was 19 years old), Flora Montellica: an introduction to the flora Trevigiana. In 1872, he published Mycologiae Venetae Specimen, in which he described some 1200 fungi species.[4] He published over 140 papers on the Deuteromycota (imperfect mushrooms) and the Pyrenomycetes. He was most famous for his Sylloge, begun in 1882, which was a comprehensive list of all of the names that had been used for mushrooms. Sylloge is still the only work of this kind that was both comprehensive for the botanical kingdom Fungi and reasonably modern. Saccardo also developed a system for classifying the imperfect fungi by spore color and form, which became the primary system used before classification by DNA analysis. Saccardo was the most prolific author of fungal species, having formally described 6052 species in his lifetime.[5]

Saccardo's chromotaxy scale

Chromotaxy scale

Saccardo proposed a color scale in 1894, for standardizing color naming of plant descriptions.

Selected publications

Indispensable in the history of mycology is his master work Sylloge fungorum omnium hucusque cognitorum (Padua 1882–90, in nine volumes) followed by the 1931 edition in 25 volumes.[6]

Books

  • Prospetto della Flora Trivigiana (Venice 1864)
  • Bryotheca Tarvisina (Treviso 1864)
  • Della storia e letteratura della Flora Veneta (Milan 1869)
  • Sommario d'un corso di botanica (3rd ed., Padua 1880)
  • Musci Tarvisini (Treviso 1872)
  • Mycologiae Venetae specimen (Padua 1873)
  • Mycotheca Veneta (Padua 1874–79)
  • Michelis, commentarium mycologicum (Padua 1877 to 1882, 2 volumes.)
  • Fungi italici autographie delineati et colorati (Padua 1877–86, with 1,500 tables)

Personal life

He had a son, Domenico Saccardo (1872 - 1952) and daughter, Neffe Francesco Saccardo (1869 - 1896).[1] His son-in-law Alessandro Trotter was involved in the posthumous completion of several of volumes of the Sylloge fungorum.

Eponyms

Saccardo was honoured in the naming of various genera and species;

See also

  • Category:Taxa named by Pier Andrea Saccardo

References

  1. 1 2 Burkhardt, Lotte (2022). Eine Enzyklopädie zu eponymischen Pflanzennamen [Encyclopedia of eponymic plant names] (pdf) (in German). Berlin: Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Freie Universität Berlin. doi:10.3372/epolist2022. ISBN 978-3-946292-41-8. Retrieved January 27, 2022.
  2. ↑ Forin, Niccolò; Nigris, Sebastiano; Voyron, Samuele; Girlanda, Mariangela; Vizzini, Alfredo; Casadoro, Giorgio; Baldan, Barbara (31 August 2018). "Next Generation Sequencing of Ancient Fungal Specimens: The Case of the Saccardo Mycological Herbarium". Front. Ecol. Evol. doi:10.3389/fevo.2018.00129. hdl:2318/1792554.
  3. ↑ Bolman, Brad (2023). "What mysteries lay in spore: taxonomy, data, and the internationalization of mycology in Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum". The British Journal for the History of Science: 1–22. doi:10.1017/S0007087423000158. ISSN 0007-0874.
  4. ↑ "Pier Andrea Saccardo, mycologist: brief biography". www.first-nature.com. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  5. ↑ Lücking, Robert (2020). "Three challenges to contemporaneous taxonomy from a licheno-mycological perspective". Megataxa. 1 (1): 78–103 [85]. doi:10.11646/megataxa.1.1.16.
  6. ↑ Davis, J. J. (1920). "Pier Andrea Saccardo". Botanical Gazette. 70 (2): 156–157. doi:10.1086/332725. ISSN 0006-8071.
  7. ↑ "Saccardia - Search Page". www.speciesfungorum.org. Species Fungorum. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  8. ↑ "Saccardoella - Search Page". www.speciesfungorum.org. Species Fungorum. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  9. ↑ "Saccardinula - Search Page". www.speciesfungorum.org. Species Fungorum. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  10. ↑ "Pasaccardoa Kuntze". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  11. ↑ "Species Fungorum - Names Record". www.speciesfungorum.org. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  12. ↑ "Saccardophytum Speg. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  13. ↑ "Saccardomyces - Search Page". www.speciesfungorum.org. Species Fungorum. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  14. ↑ "Phaeosaccardinula - Search Page". www.speciesfungorum.org. Species Fungorum. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  15. ↑ "Neosaccardia Mattir". www.gbif.org. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
  16. ↑ International Plant Names Index.  Sacc.

Other sources

  • Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1890
  • Davis, J. J. (August 1920) "Pier Andrea Saccardo" Botanical Gazette 70(2): pp. 156–157
  • Dörfelt, Heinrich and Heklau, Heike (1998) Die Geschichte der Mykologie (The History of Mycology) Einhorn-Verlag E. Dietenberger, Schwäbisch Gmünd, ISBN 3-927654-44-2
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