Alan Orange – an appreciation, 19th June 1955–5th February 2023

Abstract

Alan Orange, who died on the 5th February aged only 67, will be missed more than he would ever have guessed by members of the British Lichen Society and lichenologists across the globe. He was an outstanding naturalist and taxonomist who made detailed studies of difficult groups of organisms, from lichens and bryophytes to mites. His knowledge of sterile crusts and aquatic lichens was unrivalled. He investigated every aspect of his chosen organisms, from their morphology to their chemistry and genetics, in order to describe them taxonomically and to assess their relationships to other lichens. Alan was born in Leeds but soon afterwards the family moved to Longhope in the Forest of Dean, where his surroundings provided plenty of opportunities for botanical and other exploration, often with his cousins Heather, Margaret and Stephen, and the family’s dogs. Early on he developed his botanical skills and his taste for sorting out difficult groups of organisms, and his parents complained that his collection of brambles had taken over his bedroom! He also showed exceptional talent as an artist, producing detailed botanical drawings and sketches which he continued for the rest of his life. He was accepted for his first degree in Science at Bristol University and then for a master’s degree in Pure and Applied Plant Taxonomy at Reading University, which he completed with distinction. After graduating in the early 1980s, he worked as a field botanist based at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology field centre at Newbridge-on-Wye, Powys. Tasked with undertaking botanical survey work on the upper reaches of the Rivers Wye, Usk, Severn and Teifi, this tall, immensely quiet but undoubtably talented character with hair below his waist rejected the proffered car to drive. Instead, a motorbike was acquired. As part of a very successful team, he helped lay the foundation for the science behind the statutory conservation of rivers and so began his own fascination with the hugely variable community of aquatic lichens. In 1977, while still an undergraduate, Alan was employed by the Nature Conservancy to survey the trees and flora in the permanent transects within Lady Park Wood in the Lower Wye Valley. The resulting records were so neat, thorough and accurate that they have been used as a basis for all subsequent recording. This, now possibly the largest and most enduring long-term study in Europe of how natural woodlands behave, would have been abandoned in its youth without Alan’s contribution. When he returned in 2014 to check the lichens for the Lady Park book (Peterken & Mountford 2017), he appeared to have no idea his work had been so significant. In 1986 he was appointed Curator of Lichens at the National Museum of Wales (NMW), now Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales. His talent for illustration was quickly put to good use, producing a useful beginner’s guide to lichens on trees (Orange 1994). He held the post of curator until 2013 when he became an Honorary Research Fellow at the Museum and a self-employed biological consultant. He carried out surveys of lichens and bryophytes for many organizations including Natural Resources Wales, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Plantlife, the National Trust and ecological consultancies. His lichen collections on the database at NMW consist of more than 7000 specimens from his work in Wales and the UK, and from visits to Nordic countries and others such as Nepal. His collections and records from the numerous surveys he had completed in Wales provided information for the first checklist of Wales (Woods & Orange 1999) and later for the Conservation Evaluation of British Lichens and Lichenicolous Fungi (Woods & Coppins 2012), which is an invaluable source of information on species in need of protection. However, his personal collection of c. 15 000 specimens represents a considerable amount of his work since 2013 and is gifted to NMW. This material, consisting of lichens, fungi, bryophytes and Rubus spp., will be incorporated in the NMW database and available for further study. He was married to his long-term partner Dr Ingrid Jüttner, a diatomist, and much of Alan’s later work was carried out together with Ingrid. Although he was not easy to find, he was a good communicator with a quirky sense of humour, always ready to help amateurs and professionals with difficult taxonomic problems. If you ever worked with Alan, you learnt to observe lichen communities that often went unnoticed by other lichenologists. His wide species identification skills enabled him in 2008 to produce a monumental report for the Joint Nature Conservation Committee describing the range of bryophyte and lichendominated communities from the British uplands (Orange 2008). These communities had been omitted from the volumes of the National Vegetation Classification. This internal report deserves to be fully published. His knowledge and appreciation of sterile crusts led to 11 papers on leprarioid lichens, where he showed that these apparently simple organisms without a cortex and without sexual reproduction developed a range of metabolites that allowed them to function in a wide range of habitats across the globe. Although this required technical expertise in the laboratory, his eye for detail in the field was acute and he used a combination of morphology, simple chemical tests and UV response to make this work available to other members of the lichen community (Orange 1995), as well as at a more detailed level in editions of The Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland (Smith et al. 2009). He contributed many of the illustrations of features of lichens in The Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland. In 2006 he prepared a handbook for a British Lichen Society