Arnold (Jerry) Tiehm grew up in Reno, Nevada. He received a B.S. degree in Wildlife Management in 1974 and an M.S. degree in Botany in 1978 from the University of Nevada, Reno. He initially studied Nevada’s aquatic and wetland plants. His first professional botanical survey was at Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in 1978 which was updated in 1995. He worked on botanical surveys for the deployment of the proposed MX Missile system from 1979 to 1980. From 1983 to 1988 he worked at the New York Botanical Garden and was a collector for the Intermountain Flora Project. In between these assignments he worked as a botanical consultant for projects on public lands requiring environmental impact studies. He volunteered in the UNR herbarium from the mid-90s to 2013. Since 2013 he has been the curator of the RENO herbarium. Throughout and in between these studies, he has explored Nevada, focusing on remote regions and unusual habitats. He has gone through six field vehicles with only one having been destroyed by a cow stepping onto the highway in open range at night. He has collected over 20,000 numbers, the vast majority with numerous duplicates that are widely distributed, most of them from Nevada.

Jan Nachlinger (Janet L. Nachlinger)grew up in the Santa Clara Valley of California. She received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was introduced to botany. For five summer seasons she lived and worked in the high southern Sierra Nevada, falling in love with the alpine environment. In 1982, at the University of Nevada, Reno, she researched the effects of cloud seeding enhancement of snowpacks on mountain hemlock stands and subalpine meadows throughout the Lake Tahoe basin. In 1985 she earned an M.S. in Botany and continued plant ecological research at the Desert Research Institute. She was a conservation ecologist and planner with The Nature Conservancy of Nevada for 18 years providing opportunities to study and protect montane and alpine systems throughout the Great Basin and Mojave Desert. In early 1983 she introduced herself to Jerry Tiehm as a new student of the Nevada flora. He graciously invited her on a multiday plant collecting trip to western central Nevada, which was the start of hundreds of subsequent forays together. In 2000 she began collecting bryophytes throughout the deserts and mountains contributing numerous new records to Nevada’s bryoflora. She currently volunteers for the nonprofit science organization GLORIA Great Basin and at the RENO herbarium