Philippe Cuénoud
Philippe Cuénoud is an entomologist and botanist of Swiss and Ukrainian descent, living in Onex, who worked on the Psocoptera of Switzerland
and Papua New Guinea, as well as on plant phylogeny.
He found in 1991 the only then known population of Lachesilla rossica near Geneva and contributed further to the knowledge of the flora and fauna of the canton of Geneva with the first mention of a slender-billed gull and with the discovery of the first reported population of small-leaved helleborines. He also participated in a multidisciplinary study of the free-living fauna and flora of Basel's Zoo. In a 1999 trip to Brasil with Alain Chautems, he was among the first few people to see the newly rediscovered flower Sinningia araneosa, that had gone missing for more than a century.
In 2022, he joined Onex's City Council to help better protect a population of autumn lady's-tresses.
Entomology
Cuénoud collected Psocoptera for the best part of the year 1993 in Papua New Guinea, on the traditional grounds of the Biangai and Biaru people, in the Morobe province, as well as in the Baitabag forest, in the Madang province, and took part in a survey of the bird species of the Kuper mountain range. The rich material obtained allowed him to revise the New Guinean endemic genus Novopsocus and to describe the two new species Novopsocus magnus and Novopsocus caeciliae, by comparison with specimens of the Australian Museum lent by Courtenay Smithers.Cuénoud also had a small part in the Ibisca project, an ambitious scientific programme led by Bruno Corbara, Maurice Leponce, Hector Barrios and Yves Basset, that produced new data on the biodiversity of the San Lorenzo rainforest, on the Caribbean coast of the Panama isthmus. Cuénoud is possibly the only person this far to have seen a live specimen of the rare insect species Oronoqua ibisca, discovered during the field-sampling phase of the project and known otherwise from mounted specimens.
Botany
Cuénoud studied the phylogeny of the genus Ilex with Jean-François Manen, Pierre-André Loizeau and Rodolphe Spichiger, a study that led to the synonymy of the North American genus Nemopanthus with Ilex.He also studied the plant order Caryophyllales with Vincent Savolainen and Mark Chase in Kew Gardens, sequencing the matK gene for many of its genera, and analysing the pigments of some of them.
These results confirmed that Molluginaceae and Phytolaccaceae in their traditional sense are paraphyletic, and contributed to the recognition of the families Barbeuiaceae, Gisekiaceae, Limeaceae and Lophiocarpaceae.