Rudolf Mansfeld

Rudolf Mansfeld (17 January 1901, Berlin – 1960) was a German botanist and agricultural scientist.

For more than twenty years, he worked as a curator at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. Here he specialized in studies of Orchidaceae (orchids) and Euphorbiaceae (spurges). Following World War II, by way of a request from agriculturalist Hans Stubbe (1902-1989), he accepted a position as a laboratory technician at the Gatersleben Institute. In 1949 he succeeded Werner Rothmaler (1908-1962) as departmental director. During his last ten years at Gatersleben, he was in charge of the department of systematics.^[1]

Works

As an agricultural scientist, he developed principles for the classification of cultivated plants, and also provided a scientific basis towards the establishment and preservation of large collections of cultivated plants (gene banks).^[1] He is remembered for the encyclopedia, Verzeichnis landwirtschaftlicher und gärtnerischer Kulturpflanzen (ohne Zierpflanzen), later translated into English and published as "Mansfeld's Encyclopedia of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops".^[2] Other noted writings by Mansfeld include:

• Figuren-Atlas zu den Orchideenflora der südamerikanischen Kordillerenstaaten, 1929 (with Rudolf Schlechter) - Atlas of orchids from the South American Cordillera.
• Figuren-Atlas zu den Orchidaceen von Deutsch-Neu-Guinea, 1929 (with Rudolf Schlechter) - Atlas of orchids from German New Guinea.
• Die Technik der wissenschaftlichen Pflanzenbenennung; Einführung in die Internationalen Regeln der botanischen Nomenklatur, 1949 - The technique of scientific plant names; introduction to the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature.
• Vorläufiges Verzeichnis landwirtschaftlich oder gärtnerisch kultivierter Pflanzenarten, 1959 - Provisional list of agricultural/horticultural cultivated plant species.^[3]

References