Susan Fawcett is a National Geographic Explorer and Research Botanist at the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley. She is a member of the faculty of the University of Michigan Biological Station, providing instruction in both botany and botanical illustration. She has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Peru, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Hawaii, and in the continental U.S. She is broadly interested in systematics and floristics, with an emphasis on ferns.

Alan R. Smith is a Research Botanist (now Emeritus) in the University Herbarium at UC Berkeley, a position he has held since 1969 after completing his doctorate under John Mickel at Iowa State University on the systematics of the neotropical species of Thelypteris section Cyclosorus. He has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil, concentrating on floristic work on both Thelypteridaceae and grammitid ferns (Polypodiaceae) for various floras, and has authored or co-authored countrywide accounts of pteridophytes of Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia. In 2014, he received the Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.