This special issue honors Dr.Vicki Ann Funk(26 November 1947-22 October 2019),who passed away after a battle with an aggressive cancer(Fig.1).Dr.Funk was a Botanist at the Smithsonian Institution in 1981-2019.Vicki was an inspirational evolutionary biologist and a champion for collections-based systematics and biogeography(Funk,2018).She quite literally changed the way we perform our collections-based systematics today,and she was consistently a driving force for positive change in botany and beyond.Vicki was one of the most active,enthusiastic,and passionate professional botanists of our time.She combined these qualities with a quick mind and glowing wit,always with new ideas or opinions that she was eager to share with anyone who would listen and be willing to enter an engaging dialog.During her distinguished career,Vicki achieved pre-eminence in the fields of phylogenetic methods,systematics,biogeography,and biodiversity conservation.She was a very active member and leader in several professional societies in systematics and biogeography.Her vision and leadership as well as her passion for mentoring the next generation have had a strong influence on the direction of botanical research and the career development of many colleagues.A detailed biography of Vicki was published recently by Wagner & Specht(2020),and her contributions to systematics and biogeography can also be found in the works of Wagner et al.(2019)and Gillespie &Whittaker(2020).
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