Marcel Gustav Baumann-Bodenheim
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. His botanical author abbreviation is "Baum.-Bod."
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. He then attended the University of Zurich from 1940 until 1945 where he studied biology and obtained his doctorate in botany.
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.
He travelled with his family to New Caledonia an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean from 1950 until 1952 for a research expedition. He collected 80,000 specimens with around 15,500 herbarium specimens. The collection took many more years to process than to collect with many new genera and species being described. 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. His collection was large enough that it has been distributed to the herbariums of over 15 university's world wide. He discovered five species of Nothofagus which filled in a gap in the know distribution between New Zealand and New Guinea. 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.
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. He died at his home in Herrliberg. By his death he had completed 9 of his 24 planned volumes of Systematik der Flora von Neu-Caledonien.