Collections‐based systematics and biogeography in the 21st century: A tribute to Dr. Vicki Funk

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). Vicki pioneered the use of cladistics or phylogenetic theory in plant systematics in the late 1970s and the early 1980s (e.g., Funk & Stuessy, 1978; Funk, 1982, 1985a). She was one of the few botanists at the time who actively collaborated with leading zoologists in advocating new phylogenetic approaches in systematics (e.g., Funk & Brooks, 1981; Platnick & Funk, 1983; Wiley et al., 1991). She innovatively developed guidelines to detect hybridization events, which are common in plants, using phylogenetic patterns and extensive case studies (Funk, 1985b). She continued to extensively study the evolutionary diversification and classification of the Compositae using phylogenetics (e.g., Funk et al., 2005, 2009; Nie et al., 2013), and added next‐generation phylogenomics to her tool box for phylogenetic systematics in the last few years (e.g., Mandel et al., 2015, 2017, 2019). Vicki was one of the world's leading experts on the systematics and biogeography of the sunflower family, Compositae, the largest family of flowering plants with more than 27 000 species, accounting for 10% of all angiosperm species. She started her career in Compositae at the Ohio State University with her dissertation research on the systematics of Montanoa Cerv. (Funk, 1982) under the direction of Tod Stuessy. In 1981, she spent a postdoctoral year at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied Compositae systematics with Art Cronquist. During that time, Vicki spent 1 day a week at the American Museum of Natural History to develop her expertise and intellectual leadership among the cladistics community. In the subsequent 35 years, Vicki and her large network of collaborators across the globe generated numerous important studies on the systematics and evolution of this large, diverse, and ecologically important, and taxonomically difficult family. The spectacular Compositae book (Systematics, Evolution, and Biogeography of the Compositae) (Funk et al., 2009) is an outstanding example of Vicki's research and organizational skills, which represents the most extensive synthesis of the largest family of plants. The work won the prestigious Stebbins Medal from the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) in 2010 (Fig. 2). In her office at the Smithsonian, Vicki was surrounded by all her favorite objects of Compositae plants (Fig. 3). Vicki was one of the founding members of the International Biogeography Society (IBS), and she also served as the President for IBS (Gillespie & Whittaker, 2020). Early in her career, she advocated innovative approaches for cladistic biogeographic analyses (Funk & Brooks, 1981; Funk, 1982; Platnick & Funk, 1983). In the early 1990s, Vicki teamed with Warren Wagner to organize a symposium for the Honolulu botany meetings that explored the utility of phylogenetics to understand the biogeographic patterns of the Hawaiian archipelago. The proceedings were published in the highly influential book Hawaiian Biogeography: Evolution on a Hot Spot Archipelago (Wagner & Funk, 1995). In this volume, Funk & Wagner (1995) articulated the famous progression rule for hotspot archipelagos: clades tend to inhabit older islands first and disperse to younger islands in the order that the islands appear. The large collection of papers in Wagner & Funk (1995) set the foundation for phylogenetic biogeographic research and inspired numerous subsequent studies on the Hawaiian archipelago, the Pacific, and island systems in general (Appelhans et al., 2018a, 2018b). On our expedition to Tibet in 2006 (Fig. 4), Vicki often discussed with the many young participants on the island‐like systems on the vast Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau in Asia and inspired many phylogenetic biogeographic studies in that region (e.g., Baird et al., 2010; Wen et al., 2013, 2014; Nie et al., 2013, 2016; Zhang et al., 2019). Vicki was an exceptionally strong advocate for collections‐ based research (Funk et al., 1999; Funk & Richardson, 2002; Funk, 2004, 2006, 2017, 2018; Wen et al., 2015). She served as Director of the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Biodiversity Program (BDG) for over 30 years and supported collection of diverse organisms from plants to birds,