Ana Crespo: a 70th birthday tribute

Abstract

de las Casas was born in 1948 and grew up on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. She has always kept this archipelago close to her heart, not only because of her family there, but also because of her fascination with its flora and vegetation. Ana moved to Madrid to study biology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1970 and she defended her thesis in 1973 with summa cum laude; it was on the flora and vegetation of epiphytic lichens of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Her thesis was co-supervised by Gerhard Follmann who was at the Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum in Kassel (Germany) in the 1970s. Her early career was influenced by the phytosociological school of Salvador Rivas-Martínez in Madrid, who was also her Ph.D. advisor, and focused on the application of phytosociology to lichens. Other lichenological teachers in her early years included Josef Poelt and George Clauzade. Since there was no lichenological tradition in Spain, something difficult to imagine nowadays with the large number of highly active https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.