Acknowledgements

Nothing in this book was worked out alone, and the parts of it I trust most are the parts I was taught.

Will McClatchey has been with me through thick and thin on this adventure. He is the real expert on vouchers, and where these pages get the herbarium’s side of things right, he is the reason. A book that argues for capturing the field record properly needs someone who knows exactly what a curator will do with it, and needs that person to be willing to say when the argument is wrong. He has been both.

Mike Huddleston and I made many trips to learn the plants, most of them on the Big Island. That is not something you get from a key or a flora. It is hours in the field with someone who sees more than you do, and it is the whole reason I can look at a canopy and know when a published number is lying about it. Much of the judgment this book asks of a collector, I acquired walking with Mike.

Brian Yamamoto did the same for me on Kauaʻi. He is an expert’s expert, and time with him is a lesson in how much a person can hold about one place. Between the two islands I learned that the questions worth putting on a card are not the same everywhere — which is, in the end, this book’s central claim about decks, arrived at on foot long before it was arrived at from data.

Han Lau has been a valued colleague on questions like these over many conversations. Talking a problem through with someone who is genuinely interested in it is how most of the ideas here first took a shape I could work with.

Lan Truong gave me something rarer than advice: the opportunity to witness many of the problems this book is about, and to ponder their solutions alongside her. The chapter on purpose came out of what I saw in that work. I would not have understood the stakes from a distance, and I would not have understood them alone.

Nancy Furumoto has been a true partner through the many years I have worked on problems like this one. Without her support none of this would have been possible. That is not a courtesy at the end of a list; it is the plainest statement of fact in the book.

The errors that remain are mine, and there is a particular kind I have tried to guard against throughout: a result that looks right. Every figure and every number in these pages was checked against something independent of the thing that produced it, and where a check was not possible I have said so. That habit came from the people named above, all of whom have, at one time or another, asked me how I knew.