 His lichen specimens had been kept separate from the mounted and filed lichen collections in the herbarium at the Smithsonian Institution, Department of Botany, US) loose in brown standard herbarium paper, and were made available to Richard Spjut sometime after 1986 while he was undertaking a revision of the genus "Niebla".The epithet was proposed by Albert William Herre who considered the lichen to be a new species but did not describe the species or publish the name.