Field records of Dr. Tchang-Bok Lee based on herbarium specimens deposited at SNUA

Abstract

The period from 1946 until his retirement from Department of Forest Resources, Seoul National University was a time of research and professional activity on many fronts for Korean Plant Taxonomy. From 1952 to 1984, he travelled south Korea and collected more than 70,000 specimens. Working out of this project, Dr. Lee developed the SNUA herbarium (Herbarium of The Arboretum of Seoul National University) as the best University herbarium in Korea for the modem floristic work. Dr. Lee's first interest rests on his contributions to our understanding of the twig identification in early 1950. Asian deciduous oak taxa have attracted particular focus to him late 1950 and early 1960. Accordingly Dr. Lee has been one of the specialists on systematic study of Asian oak which is a basis of identification in eastern Asia now. Dr. Lee's contributions concerning rare and endangered plants in Korea provide a tremendous information after a Japanese taxonomist, T. Nakai did in early 1920 to late 1930 in Korea. During his fourteen year career from 1970 to 1984, Dr. Lee spent time to investigate flora of many local and National Park sites. Much of his effort was directed to the voucher specimens for which he worked for the Illustrated Flora of Korea and also served as a field collector. These collections at SNUA enabled us to extend our educational outreach from the local to the national flora research. Although Dr. Lee has been and continues to be the soul of SNUA, collection records about his purpose and aim for each trip are not well documented except date and field studied sites. This lesson enables us to tackle the same issue of balancing quantity and quality with well documented specimens now.