Heinrich Mayr

Heinrich Mayr (29 October 1854 – 24 January 1911) was a German forest scientist, dendrologist and university professor whose research and teaching shaped forest botany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His standard botanical author abbreviation is Mayr.

Life and career

Mayr was born in Landsberg am Lech, the son of the Bavarian senior forester Clemens Mayr. After the Ludwigsgymnasium in Munich he spent two years at the Royal Forestry Academy in Aschaffenburg, followed by a one-year political-economy course at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he joined the . From 1879, he served as a trainee forester in the Alpine foreland and, having passed the state examination in 1880, became assistant to the eminent mycologist Robert Hartig at the Bavarian Forestry Research Station. Under Hartig, he earned a doctorate in 1884 with a Latin thesis on the birch parasites Fomitopsis betulina and Phellinus laevigatus, and the same year submitted his habilitation on the comparative anatomy of secretory organs in Norway spruce and European larch.