Jacques Ernest Joseph Lambinon (28 September 1936 – 14 November 2015) was a Belgian botanist and lichenologist who served as professor of plant systematics and geography at the University of Liège and as a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, serving as its president in 1999. He was the principal driving force behind successive editions of the Nouvelle Flore de la Belgique, du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, du Nord de la France et des Régions voisines, which became the standard identification flora for vascular plants in Belgium, Luxembourg, northern France and neighbouring areas. His research also extended to lichens and lichenicolous fungi in Western Europe, the floristics of Luxembourg, and the flora of regions such as Central Africa and the Mediterranean basin. A wide range of vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi and even a cyanobacterium have been named in his honour, including the lichenicolous genus Lambinonia.
Life and academic career Born in Namur on 28 September 1936, Lambinon was the son of Alphonse Lambinon, a travelling salesman for a tobacco manufacturer, and Léona Radelet. After a classical education at the Athénée royal de Namur, he studied biological sciences at the Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur (1953–1955), then completed a degree in botanical sciences at the Université catholique de Louvain (1955–1957) under the botanist Pierre Martens, obtaining a secondary-school teaching qualification in the same year. He was then taken on as a trainee at the State Botanical Garden of Brussels in the team working on the flora of Central Africa, where he attracted the attention of Fredi Darimont, who secured a scholarship for him from the University of Liège and arranged his appointment as assistant there in 1959. From the outset his publications covered a broad spectrum of groups – vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens and fungi – and dealt with both the European and Central African floras, as well as with non-native species. He defended his doctoral thesis at Liège in 1966, a taxonomic and phytogeographical revision of the macrolichens of Belgium and neighbouring regions, which formed the basis of his later book Les Lichens (1969). Over the following decades he taught and carried out research in systematic botany and phytogeography at Liège, where he helped build up an important herbarium and literature collection. After the accidental death of Darimont in 1966, Lambinon took over the course in cryptogamy at Liège, and in the following year also inherited the courses in phytogeography and plant systematics after the retirement of Raymond Bouillenne and Armand Monoyer. He rose through the academic ranks to become a full professor in 1973 and was entrusted with the new chair of plant systematics and geography. That year he moved with his group into the newly constructed Institute of Botany on the Sart Tilman campus, where he assembled a team of specialists in different plant and fungal groups, including Paul Auquier (grasses), René Schumacker (lichens and bryophytes), Vincent Demoulin (fungi and algae) and Emmanuël Sérusiaux (lichens). His laboratory became a focal point for lichenological and floristic work in the region, regularly welcoming visiting researchers such as the Luxembourg lichenologist Paul Diederich, who made intensive use of the herbarium material and library in preparing his own thesis and later publications. Lambinon became an emeritus professor in 2001, which allowed him to concentrate on the later editions of the Nouvelle Flore and to return to his long-standing interest in plant galls. Lambinon was described by his collaborators as a generous mentor whose detailed comments, corrections and practical advice substantially improved numerous manuscripts and floristic projects in Belgium and Luxembourg. Fabri also records Lambinon's involvement in wider institutional debates. In 1973 he opposed the transfer of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium from central Brussels to Meise, and several decades later he again intervened against proposals to regionalise the institution, arguing for its continued role as a federal scientific centre.
Vascular-flora work and the Nouvelle Flore In 1967 Lambinon joined Joseph-Edgard De Langhe, Léon Delvosalle, Jacques Duvigneaud, André Lawalrée, Constant Vanden Berghen and William Mullenders as one of the authors of the Flore de la Belgique, du Nord de la France et des Régions voisines, the first modern field flora of the region to appear since the work of Jules Goffart. Six years later, largely the same team published the Nouvelle Flore de la Belgique, du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, du Nord de la France et des Régions voisines, with the National Botanic Garden of Belgium as publisher. This work, whose subsequent editions appeared in both French and Dutch, rapidly became the standard identification manual for professional and amateur botanists in the area. Although the Nouvelle Flore was initially a collective project, Lambinon increasingly became its leading architect. He was the principal author of the detailed articles, published in journals such as Lejeunia and Dumortiera, that documented nomenclatural, taxonomic and distributional changes between successive editions. From the fourth French edition (1992) he was listed as first author, and by the fifth edition only Delvosalle and Duvigneaud remained from the original team. The sixth edition, prepared with Filip Verloove and published in 2012, was the last in which he participated; by then he was the sole surviving member of the original author group. A large part of this work was underpinned by an elaborate index card system in which Lambinon recorded every proposed modification – taxonomic, nomenclatural or chorological – for the flora. Over the decades he accumulated around two thousand such entries, each carefully justified on its card. This documentation, along with other archives relating to the Belgian flora, was later donated to the herbarium and archives of Meise Botanic Garden.
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