Rosette Batarda Fernandes

Rosette Mercedes Saraiva Batarda (10 January 1916 in Redondo, Alentejo – 28 May 2005) was a Portuguese botanist and taxonomist who was married to Abílio Fernandes (1906–1994), another Portuguese botanist and taxonomist. She is denoted by the author abbreviation R.Fern. when citing a botanical name.

She enrolled at the Escola Secundária Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho in 1928 and graduated in 1941 in Biological Sciences from the University of Lisbon. In June of the same year, attending a Congress of Natural Sciences in Lisbon, she met Abilio Fernandes, who was soon to be her husband. They settled in Coimbra, after Abilio moved there in August 1941 to take up the position of Museum Director at the University of Coimbra. In November 1947 he was appointed Naturalist of that institution, and remained there for the rest of his career. Rosette proceeded to reorganise and update the classification of herbarium material and published an index of seeds of the Botanical Garden. She went on numerous botanical collecting trips in Portugal, and arranged expeditions to Mozambique with her husband where they made large collections of plants, greatly increasing the herbarium material of the Botanical Institute of Coimbra and the Center for Tropical Research.

Between 1944 and 1991, she attended 41 international congresses, held in Spain, France, UK, Sweden and Portugal, while between 1945 and 2000, she published some 250 papers, mainly in the field of plant systematics, but also in karyology, ethnobotany and the history of botany. From her considerable work in plant taxonomy, and numerous new combinations, she described more than fifty taxa new to science.

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