Marcel Gustav Baumann-Bodenheim | |
---|---|
Born | January 26, 1920 |
Died | February 18, 1996 | (aged 76)
Citizenship | Switzerland |
Known for | Botanist in New Caledonia |
Marcel Gustav Baumann-Bodenheim (January 26, 1920 – February 18, 1996) was a Swiss botanist.[1] His botanical author abbreviation is "Baum.-Bod."[2]
Baumann-Bodenheim was born January 26, 1920 in Baden in Germany the moved to Wettingen in Switzerland as a child and where he started studied to become a teacher.[3] He then attended the University of Zurich from 1940 until 1945 where he studied biology and obtained his doctorate in botany.[3]
He started his career in 1946 when he obtained a post as an exchange assistant at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands where he also met his wife to be.[4]
He travelled with his family to New Caledonia an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean from 1950 until 1952 for a research expedition.[3] He collected 80,000 specimens with around 15,500 herbarium specimens.[3] The collection took many more years to process than to collect with many new genera and species being described.[3] By 1988 he had complete the management of the collection and started working on producing the planted 24 volumes of Systematik der Flora von Neu-Caledonien.[3] His collection was large enough that is has been distributed to the herbariums of over 15 university's world wide.[3] He discovered five species of Nothofagus which filled in a gap in the know distribution between New Zealand and New Guinea.[4] He later took up teaching biology at a secondary school in Zurich but continued to work on the flora of New Caledonia in his personal time.[4]
He succumbed to Parkinson's disease and was forced to retire early and was bedbound for the last eight years of his life until his death February 18, 1996.[3] He died at his home in Herrliberg.[4] By his death he had completed 9 of his 24 planed volumes of Systematik der Flora von Neu-Caledonien.[4]