Pierre Tranquille Husnot was a French botanist and bryologist, born on 21 April 1840 in Cahan par Athis, Orne, Normandy. Trained as an agricultural engineer at the École d’Agriculture de Grignon, he developed an early interest in botany and undertook extensive botanical travels between 1862 and 1875 in Europe, Africa and the Americas, with particularly important fieldwork in the French West Indies and the Canary Islands.
During his 1868 expedition to the French West Indies, Husnot collected extensively in Martinique and Guadeloupe. His 1870 “Catalogue des cryptogames recueillis aux Antilles françaises” was the first catalogue devoted to the bryophytes of the French Antilles and included information on species frequency, habitat, altitudinal distribution and geographical patterns. His work provided one of the earliest systematic foundations for bryological research in the Lesser Antilles. In 1870, Husnot published the first catalogue of the bryophytes of the French West Indian islands, an important early contribution to the knowledge of the bryoflora of this tropical region. His interests there extended beyond bryophytes, as shown by his 1871 publication on grasses and allied plants collected in the French Antilles. During the 1860s he collected also in Tenerife.
After returning to Normandy, he combined management of the family farm at Cahan with an exceptionally productive botanical career. His research increasingly focused on mosses and liverworts, leading to major works on the French bryophyte flora, including Hepatologia Gallica and Muscologia Gallica.
In 1874, Husnot founded the Revue Bryologique, which he directed, edited and published until the end of 1927. Through this journal, his floristic works and the distribution of bryophyte exsiccatae, he became a central figure in French and European bryology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
