College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Traveling man

Donald Farrar has stayed busy and on the road since retirement.
In the year since he has been retired from Iowa State, Donald Farrar has been on the road traveling to national parks and many western states.

And his plans this summer are more of the same - journeys to Alaska, California, Colorado and Canada are in the offing. But if you think these are pleasure trips to see the tourist sites you couldn't be more wrong.

"I enjoy being outside," says the emeritus professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology who retired after 36 years at Iowa State last July, "and this type of work gets me outdoors."

Farrar studies ferns and the plants' reproductive biology in the wild - and he remains one of the few experts in this field. As a result, he gets called on to produce a genetic fingerprint when it is suspected a new species has been discovered or another species is endangered by logging or construction.

"Once you become an authority on a particular species you get invited to contribute information in a lot of publications and give talks all over the place," he said. "I think it is a privilege, but also an obligation, that we summarize the knowledge and perspective gained over a course of a career."

Some of the publications he has been involved with recently include Peterson's Guide To Eastern Ferns, The Jepson Manual for California Ferns, Flora of the Four Corners Area, The Biology of Evolution of Ferns and Morphology, Systematics and Phylogeny of Pteridophytes (of India).

"Then when word gets out that you're retired, you get more and more requests to do papers, reviews and on-site visits," Farrar says.

In recent years those requests have come from a variety of sources.

The U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. National Park Service are frequent callers. His trip to Canada comes through an invitation from that nation's government. There he will work in Quebec to look at species of ferns that no one thought they had.

He will also work with the Fish & Wildlife Service and Canadian National Parks studying endangered ferns in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska and Kluane National Park in Yukon. In Nevada ad California, he will traverse the southern Sierras "trying to track down an endangered species."

But it's not just publications and site visits that have kept Farrar almost as busy in retirement as he was while on the Iowa State faculty. He is a frequent presenter at conferences, including three scheduled talks this summer including a symposium presentation to the Botanical Society of America. He also conducted a half-day workshop at the Wyoming Native Plant Conference.

Add in a two-week graduate course in Costa Rica, a symposium in India and a workshop in Michigan already scheduled for 2008 and Farrar doesn't need to sign up for any vacation tours any time soon.

"I love the places my research takes me and the people I work with, particularly the botanists of our public lands," Farrar says. "These botanists operate on the cutting edge of preserving the natural world as we know it. They are on the front lines of a ‘real world' battle to preserve our native species and ecosystems and the services they provide. It pleases me to participate in their work."