ROLF AND GERTRUD DAHLGREN PRIZE FOR 2023 AWARDED TO LOUIS RONSE DE CRAENE

On 2 December 2023, at the annual celebration of the foundation of the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund, Sweden, the Rolf and Gertrud Dahlgren Prize for 2023 was awarded to Louis Ronse De Craene, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. The Prize, inaugurated in 1988, is given every third year to a scientist who has made major contributions to botany in the broad-minded spirit of Rolf and Gertrud Dahlgren, particularly in the fields of systematics and evolution of the angiosperms, and regardless of their nationality. The prize-winner is chosen by active researchers in various fields of botany. Ronse De Craene has been awarded the prize for his work on floral development in a broad range of angiosperm families and the importance of floral morphology in the context of modern phylogenetic studies.

Ronse De Craene was born in Kortrijk/Courtrai (Flemish Region of Belgium) in 1962. He obtained an M.Sc. at the University of Reading (U.K.) in 1986, with a thesis in which he proposed a clearer circumscription of the genus Polygonum based on floral morphological and anatomical characters. He received a doctorate at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1992 on a dissertation about the androecium of the angiosperms (The androecium of the Magnoliophytina: Characterisation and systematic importance). After postdoctoral research at Leuven for eight years, he became Director of the M.Sc. program in Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants jointly organised by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) and the University of Edinburgh, a post he held from 2002 to 2022. He remains attached at the RBGE as a Research Associate and an external lecturer.

At Leuven and Edinburgh, Ronse De Craene developed a broad research program on flower morphology, studying in detail the floral development and anatomy of many angiosperm families in collaboration with scientists around the world. His most important contribution is a book entitled Floral diagrams: An aid to understand floral morphology and evolution, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 (revised second edition in 2022). This book explores floral morphology of the angiosperms as an essential counterpart of their molecular phylogeny, and it continues in modern botany the scientific approach of Carolus Linnaeus, Wilhelm Eichler, Eugen Warming, and Rolf Dahlgren, among others. Taken as a whole, Ronse De Craene's work represents a valuable combination of research in several areas of systematics and evolution of the angiosperms.

The Rolf and Gertrud Dahlgren Prize is awarded by the Royal Physiographic Society at Lund, an institution with the secondary title of Academy for the Natural Sciences, Medicine and Technology. This academy was founded on 2 December 1772, by, among others, the botanist Anders Jahan Retzius, for whom the South African genus Retzia (Retziaceae, or Stilbaceae) is named, and father of the anatomist Anders Adolf Retzius. Carl Peter Thunberg was elected member in 1773 and Carolus Linnaeus the elder in 1775. Professor Rolf Dahlgren, who was also a member, is best known for his system of angiosperm classification based on the evaluation of many more characters than previously had been used, including anatomical and chemical characters. Dahlgren's classification of the monocotyledons in particular has had lasting influence. Educated at the University of Lund, Rolf Dahlgren became professor of systematic botany at the Botanical Museum and Library (now part of the Natural History Museum of Denmark) at the University of Copenhagen, where he worked from 1973 to his death in 1987. The prize was established by donations from Lund, Copenhagen, and other botanical centres. It has been the tradition that the prize-giving involved both the ceremony in Lund (Fig. 1) and a visit to Copenhagen (Fig. 2), usually with a lecture given by the prize-winner at both universities.

Fig. 1

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Catherine and Louis Ronse De Craene at the prize-giving ceremony in Lund, December 2023 (Photo: Ellinor Nordin).

Fig. 2

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Ib Friis, Natasha de Vere and Louis Ronse De Craene in front of the Palm House in the Copenhagen Botanical Garden where Rolf Dahlgren was professor (Photo: Catherine Ronse De Craene).