Andreas Schimper

German botanist and phytogeographer who made major contributions in the fields of histology, ecology and plant geography.

Andreas studied at the University of Strassburg from 1874 to 1878, acquiring a Ph.D. Thereafter he worked in Lyon and travelled to the United States, staying in Baltimore and Massachusetts. In 1886 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor in Bonn, where he worked largely on cell histology, chromatophores and starch metabolism. He had become interested in phytogeography and ecology, undertaking expeditions to the West Indies and Venezuela in 1882-1883, and to Ceylon, Malaya and Java in 1889-1890, concentrating on mangroves, epiphytes and littoral vegetation. This resulted in his account of the Rhizophoraceae in Engler & Prantl's Naturl. Pflanzenfam. He is best known for Pflanzengeographie auf Physiologischer Grundlage (Jena, 1898), in which he coined the terms tropical rainforest and sclerophyll.

In 1898 he accepted an invitation to join the German deep-sea expedition aboard the SS Valdivia under the leadership of Prof. Carl Chun. The trip lasted nine months during which time they visited the Canary Islands, Cameroon, Cape Town, (where he joined Rudolf Marloth on collecting trips in the southern Cape), Kerguelen, New Amsterdam and Cocos Islands, Sumatra, the Maldives, Ceylon, the Seychelles and the Red Sea.

Returning in 1899, he took up the appointment of Professor of Botany at the University of Basel. His health had been seriously affected by malaria contracted in Cameroon and Dar-es-Salaam and he died on 9 September 1901, aged 45.