Photograph courtesty of Alumni
Relations
Southern Adventist University in Collegedale,
Tennessee USA
The University of
North Carolina Herbarium (NCU) has catalogued approximately 100
specimens collected by Duane F. Houck. His specimens are usually
signed "D.F. Houck" and are on labels bearing the title
"FLORA OF DEEP RIVER BASIN." NCU is currently cataloguing
all specimens collected in Moore and Perquimans Counties, North
Carolina, so many more of Houck's specimens will be found in the
near future.
Houck earned a B.A. in 1950 from Andrews
University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Most of Houck's specimens
at NCU were collected in 1955-1956 for his Master's Thesis, "Flood
plain flora of the Deep River Triassic Basin," which he completed
in 1956 under the direction of Dr. Al Radford. Houck completed
his Ph.D., "Primary phloem regeneration without concomitant
xylem regenration: controlling factors in Coleus blumei,"
at Iowa State University in 1973.
Houck taught in the Division of Natural
Science at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee
for 21 years. He also taught for ten years at Helderberg College
in Somerset West, South Africa. Houck was particularly interested
in tropical forest conservation, and spent several months each
year at the Belize Agroforestry Research Center. He collected
plants of southern Belize and established an herbarium emphasizing
the ethnobotany of the Maya.
Duane Houck is survived
by his wife, Florence, who lives in Ooltewah, Tennessee.
The following is from the Tropical Conservation Foundation's
website:
http://www.tcf-barc.org/index.html and http://www.tcf-barc.org/barcgeninfo.htm
Hurricane Iris October 8-9, 2001 in Belize:
Our first priority was recovering the herbarium. For those of
you who have not seen it, Duane Houck spent a huge amount of time
collecting pressing and cataloging the Flora of Belize. It was
several hundred different plants all arranged by family in a professional
herbarium cabinet that he drove down from Tennessee. It had been
located on the second floor of the main building and now was somewhere
under several feet of wood and thatch rubble.
It took us most of the first day to clear enough wood out of the
way to get to the herbarium.
It had been swept off the second floor, landed hard on its bottom
and then absorbed the weight of the building falling on top of
it. It was lying on its back which meant that water was getting
inside of it and soaking the specimens and books stored inside.
We pulled it to safety and then began the three day long task
of laying out the hundreds of pages in the sun to dry. Because
the cabinet was almost upside down, the damage was pretty much
reserved to the families higher in the alphabetical order. The
A's and B's were severely damaged. The Compositaceae, the largest
family, had extensive damage. The D's through F's had some damage,
mostly water stains at the top of the page. Some of the Flora
of Guatemala books had some water damage, otherwise the collection
was saved. The cabinet itself got pretty bent up, but a lot of
pounding got it to the point where the door would close. We dried
everything out and carried it to the second floor of the new building.
So, the collection was saved and is quite useable.
PUBLICATIONS (incomplete list):
Houck, Duane F. and Loren H. Rieseberg
(1983) Hormonal regulation of epiphyllous bud release in Bryophyllum
calycinum. BioScience 33(10): 656-657.
Houck, Duane F. and Loren H. Rieseberg (1983 ) Hormonal regulation
of epiphyllous bud release and development in Bryophyllum
calycinum. American Journal of Botany 70(6): 912-915.
Houck, Duane F. and Clifford E. LaMotte (1977) Primary phloem
regeneration without concomitant xylem regeneration: its hormone
control in Coleus. Amer. J. Bot. 64(7): 799-809.
Houck, Duane R. (1973) Primary phloem regeneration without concomitant
xylem regeneration: controlling factors in Coleus. Iowa State
University, Ph.D. Thesis.
Houck, Duane F. (1956) Flood plain flora of the Deep River Triassic
Basin. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Masters Thesis.
Photograph courtesty of Alumni
Relations
Southern Adventist University in Collegedale,
Tennessee USA
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