LAUSR

This special issue is dedicated to Dr Eric McKenzie of Landcare Research, New Zealand, for his immense efforts to promote and improve mycology. Known as the “Master” in inner circles, Eric has this knack of doing things most of us cannot even wish for. His ability to read manuscripts more than 300 pages long and comment on them thoughtfully from beginning to end is just amazing. Even though he works in a research institute and has no students himself, he has tirelessly co-supervised students, introducing many excellent protégées into the mycology world. Eric is an unselfish editor and reviewer of manuscripts. He is not strongly opinionated or political, and thus his reviews of papers are both thorough and fair. Eric received his PhD in microbiology and botany from the prestigious Cambridge University, UK, in 1975. Unlike his life, which has been varied, his career has been in one place. From 1969 to1992, he was a scientist with the Plant Diseases Division of the New Zealand Division of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) Plant Protection, Auckland, where he was curator of the New Zealand Fungal Herbarium, PDD. Since 1992, he has worked at Landcare Research, Auckland (the same place, in a different building with a different name). He has helped establish a renowned herbarium with excellent facilities and an adjacent culture collection, and has always been very helpful to those colleagues who wanted to study the fungi of New Zealand and collections of other areas in the South Pacific. He himself has collected various specimens that are kept in prime condition. Thus many endemic taxa of New Zealand were discovered by specialists during their work on world monographs. Eric is very well travelled and has carried out research in American Samoa, Cambodia, Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Thailand, Tonga, Vietnam and Vanuatu. Since 1975, he has been involved in plant disease surveys of 15 Pacific countries, spending overall approximately three years in the field collecting specimens. He has identified most of the fungi involved in the diseases, and has authored eight major publications listing and describing crop pests from these countries. He was team leader for a major Fiji pest survey of crops with export potential. Eric recently retired from Landcare Research, but continues to work on his dream organisms. Much of his role had involved research on fungi for quarantine purposes, evidenced by the expected boost to New Zealand’s export earnings by $1 million annually in the buttercup squash industry, thanks to a science review released in 2003. The New Zealand Kabocha Council, which represents New Zealand’s 140 buttercup squash growers, and exports about 90,000 tonnes of product annually, commissioned Landcare Research to review the naming, biology and distribution of a fungus associated with squash that was believed to threaten South Korean rice crops. Eric’s research revealed that the fungus in question was not a quarantine pest, and was in fact a case of mistaken identity. This research has enabled the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to prove to the South Koreans that the concerns were based on the wrong ‘pest’, which brought to an end a problem that had persisted for several years. He has * Marc Stadler [email protected]