Ludwig Diels

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Dr. Friedrich Ludwig Emil Diels (* 24. September 1874 in Hamburg; † 30. November 1945 in Berlin) was a German botanist.

Diels was the son of the classical scholar Hermann Alexander Diels. From 1900 to 1902 he traveled together with Ernst Pritzel through South Africa, Java, Australia and New Zealand. Shortly before the first world war he travelled New Guinea and in the 1930s in Ecuador. Especially his collections of plants from Australia and Ecuador, which contained numerous holotypes, enriched the knowledge of the concerning floras. His monography on the Droseraceae from 1906 is still a standard.

Far the most of his collections have been stored at the famous botanical garden in Berlin-Dahlem, whose vicedirector he was since 1913, becoming its director in 1921 until 1945. His collections have been destroyed there throughout a bomb attack in 1943.