Nick Otting Author

Cindy Talbott Roché earned a PhD from the University of Idaho in Plant Science. She has lived and worked in both Washington and Oregon; her field experience includes agency employment and consulting work with native and weedy grasses.  From her background in writing and editing natural resource publications as well as illustrating grasses for the Flora of North America, she brings a patient attention to detail to the field guide illustrations and text.
 
Richard E. Brainerd holds an MS from Oregon State University. He has been a botanical consultant in the Pacific Northwest for over 25 years, conducting rare plant surveys, wetland delineations, natural resource inventories, and plant taxonomic research. His strengths combine taxonomic expertise with field experience, which enabled him to tackle difficult groups for the field guide, for example, Bromus.

Barbara L. Wilson holds a PhD from Oregon State University, where she studied the taxonomy of Festuca. She founded the Carex Working Group and has taught sedge and grass identification workshops for many years and brings a strong background in grass taxonomy to this project. She and Otting have published several new species of grasses. The three members of the former Carex Working Group (Wilson, Brainerd, Otting) collaborated on the keys in this book.
 
Nick Otting has an MS from Oregon State University. He spends the field seasons studying the flora of the shrub-steppe and the mountains east of the Cascades.  He has dedicated recent off-seasons to aggressively editing and testing grass identification keys with a view towards making grasses ever more accessible for students, and of course, towards opening the doors of this—to him--high art and practice of grass identification. 
 
Robert C. Korfhage received his MS from Washington State University in Range and Wildlife Ecology. He enjoyed a long career with the Bureau of Land Management as wildlife biologist and natural resource manager. Using his passion for photography, he captured many of the images and edited all of the photos for the field guide.