Allen C. Skorepa

Allen C. Skorepa

Allen Charles Skorepa, was an American lichenologist, and a specialist on the Lichens of Maryland. Skorepa was born in Berwyn, Illinois, on August 25, 1941, and died September 4, 1998 at the age of 57. Allen spent his childhood years in Brookfield, Illinois, and graduated from Riverside-Brookfield High School in 1959. He attended Southern Illinois University where he majored in botany and zoology; he was graduated in 1967 with a B.A. and M.A. Degree in Botany.

From 1967 to 1973, he was a Graduate Assistant at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a Staff Assistant in the Department of Botany at Southern Illinois University. He conducted environmental impact studies for the Tennessee Valley Authority and was involved in studying the impact of air pollution on lichens.

Allen studied lichen identification at the University of Tennessee, under the tutorage of Dr. Aaron J. Sharp, a distinguished bryologist. In 1970 he published on the lichens of Illinois and in 1971 on the lichens of Tennessee. In 1973 he was awarded a Ph. D. degree from the University of Tennessee for his dissertation titled "Taxonomic and ecological studies on the lichens of Southern Illinois". During the summer of 1973, Allen Skorepa collected lichens in Alaska.

In the summer of 1976, Allen Skorepa, Arnold Norden & Donald Windler were granted a contract by the Power Plant Siting Program of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to study the use of lichens as indicator organisms for the detection of pollutants. Thus, for the next two years these three researchers set about scouring the state for lichen specimens. They succeeded in collecting over 3,000 specimens which were deposited in the Towson State University Herbarium (BALT). In the December 1977 issue of Castanea, Skorepa et al. listed 242 species of lichens collected in Maryland.

Further collecting yielded an additional 92 species making a total of 306 species of lichens for Maryland. These 92 species were listed in a 1979 publication that dealt mainly with substrate preferences of the various species.

Most of the species of lichens listed in the Lichens of Maryland are from Allen Skorepa's identifications.