The phycologist Pierre Compère: his contribution to cyanobacterial studies

Abstract

We are celebrating the 80th birthday of the Belgian phycologist Pierre Compere. This reminds that some research disciplines have birth-like starts, growth and maturation, just like the personalities that become involved and contribute to them. We are referring to Pierre Compere’s work on algae and blue-green algae (as cyanobacteria were called then). Indeed, he was among the few scientists who took these organisms seriously and engaged in the frustrating work with this group of colourful but variable bacteria. As very well described in the biography written by Fabri & Symoens (2000), Pierre Compere was born in 1934 in Aywaille, Belgium, and got a degree in Botanical Sciences at the University of Liege. He had a long and successful career in phycology with a major contribution to systematics and ecology of algae and cyanobacteria. He started his botanical studies in 1959 in Africa, as a part of a survey of flora and vegetation of the lower Congo region, carried out by the National Institute for Agriculture in what was then Belgian Congo. After Congo’s Independence in 1960, Pierre’s work continued within the Belgian Institute for Overseas Scientific Research, which included the elaboration of a large collection of herbarium specimens. This work was published in 1970 as a part of the scientific series of Maps of Soils and Vegetation of Congo (“Cartes des sols et de la vegetation du Congo”) and was awarded the Emile De Wildeman Price of the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium. His phycological career really started in 1963 when Pierre Compere obtained the position for Algology at the National Botanic Garden of Belgium and started a collaboration with Pierre Bourrelly of the Laboratory for Cryptogamic Botany of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. During his career at the Botanic Garden, Pierre has studied the freshwater algal diversity from various regions of the