Gil, always a reader, enjoyed the memoir A River Runs Through It and Other Stories not only for its literary merits, but also because it was set in the Missoula of his youth.

I don’t remember too much about that except a nurse came around every few hours and gave me a shot of penicillin (pretty new stuff then) and we finally arrived at Paris where we were taken to a large hospital.

actually went through that experience and am alive and well today.On Friday October 25, 1985, he again remembered the war when he wrote about a trip to Europe when he worked at Kew and went sightseeing in London.

His PhD degree was completed in 1954 in mycology and forest pathology with a thesis on Polyporus montagnei and Cyclomyces greenii and published his first paper on these species in Mycologia in 1954.

He spent 26 years on the faculty in Tucson until his retirement from teaching in 1995 and then as Professor Emeritus until his death on October 26, 2011, from complications due to prostate cancer Gil's Obituary Arizona Daily Star In 2001, he was honoured by botanist Erast Parmasto who named a fungal genus in the family Fomitopsidaceae as Gilbertsonia.

It contains almost 40,000 wood-decaying and other fungal specimens, especially from Arizona and the western United States, Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Gulf Coast region.

The National Science Foundation recently supplied funding for digitization that currently is underway and should soon be available by searching the herbarium on the Internet.

The Herbarium is unique because its specialized collections document the occurrence of a complex, speciose desert mycota in a region once said by proposal reviewers to have no fungi.

Gil put great stock in the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture (1941) that contained state unit values for precipitation.

Gil's contributions to mycology extended to many fungal groups, most notably Sonoran Desert rusts, myxomycetes, downy mildews, and ascomycetes, and even the fungus-like plant pathogens, Pythium and Labyrinthula .

Gil described many new fungal species from under-studied substrates, including fungi that are associated with Sonoran Desert plants and cacti.

These aspects included systematics, floristics, cultural morphology, genetics of sexuality including homogenic and heterogenic incompatibility, biochemical and ultrastructural changes in wood during decay, and the use of these fungi for commercial degradation of wood and the biological breakdown of toxic phenolic environmental pollutants.

Dr. Gilbertson's research on species of the genus Ganoderma has shown that several are capable of selective delignification, degrading lignin at a faster rate than they do the polysaccharide components of the wood cell wall.

Dr. Gilbertson's research with this and other species of Ganoderma was directed at determining the relation of temperature and length of exposure to delignification and rate of decay.

Research on the systematics and floristics of wood-rotting fungi has been directed at the urgency to elucidate biological diversity in world ecosystems.

He had a fruitful association with Don Hemmes and other colleagues including Jack Rogers and Karen Nakasone, and many of his last scientific papers cover those fungi.

It was fun to revisit the places where Joe [Lowe], Ross [Davidson], Alex [Smith], and I collected in 1956 [when Gil was 31 and working at Idaho].

"[12] Gil had many close friends who studied fungi, and after graduation he traveled throughout the country with his major professor Josiah Lowe.

Another close friend, George Baker Cummins, retired to Tucson, where he spent many productive years working in space Gil shared with him.

John G. Palmer, Frances F. Lombard, Harold H. Burdsall, Jr., Michael J. Larsen, and Orson K. Miller, Jr. are several other colleagues acknowledged in his presidential address who were an integral part of Gil's mycological and personal life, and who and shared his interest in wood-rotting fungi.

After retirement, Gil collected extensively in Hawaii, the specimens being the basis for a number of papers on the Hawaiian mycota, authored with Don Hemmes, Jim Adaskaveg, Karen Nakasone, Erast Parmasto, Jack Rogers and Dennis Desjardin, significantly adding to the biogeographical knowledge of the islands.

Gil was close to his own students, and these included MS students, many of whom went on to get PhDs with another advisor, Daniel O. Ebo, K. Sieglinde Neuhauser, Douglas C. Rhodes, Karen K. Nakasone, Donna Goldstein, Anjuwaree Ronaritivichai, Mary Lou Fairweather, James J. Flott, Kevin M. McCann, and Donna M. Bigelow.

Page Lindsey, Rogerio T. de Almeida, Robert L. Mathiasen, Karin H. Yohem, Julietta Carranza, and Phyllis T. Himmel.

Gil, Frank, and Gordon Wallis updated the list of western forest diseases, and Gil included brown felt blight, “bear wipe,” a disease of conifers caused by Neopeckia coulteri Neopeckia or Herpotrichia juniperi (Frank G. Hawksworth, Robert L. Gilbertson, and Gordon W. Wallis, 1984).

Gil leaves a great legacy of papers, a herbarium specialized in wood-decaying fungi and a group of students and collaborators to carry on.