German (Prussian) horticulturist, plant collector and traveller who collected plants in Brazil on behalf of the Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg. After arriving in Brazil in 1821 he spent nearly the rest of his life there and was the first foreigner appointed within the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, as director of the herbarium and botanic garden. Prior to this Riedel had served in the Prussian army (1813-1815) and collected plants in the south of France (1816-1817). He arrived in Brazil in 1821 as a collector for the Academy of Sciences and Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg, collecting in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais in his first three years in the country. He then joined an expedition led by the German-Russian naturalist and explorer Baron von Langsdorff (Russia's consul in Rio from 1813-1820). Langsdorff's goal was to complete a voyage from São Paolo to Pará, crossing Mato Grosso and descending the Madeira and Amazon rivers, collecting all manner of scientific objects and observations along the way. To this end he also invited the zoologists Édouard Ménétries and Christian Hasse, the Russian astronomer and cartographer Nester Gavrilovitch Rubtsov, and a handful of artists. The bicycle inventor Karl Drais was also a participant. The expedition's seven boats left from Porto Feliz on the Tietê river in 1826 and reached Cuiabá in Mato Grosso in early 1827, where they split into two parties for the next stage of the journey. Riedel's group (including artist Adrien Taunay) would head along the Guaporé, Manoré and Madeira rivers, Langsdorff and company down the rivers Arinos, Juruena and Tapajos. The expedition’s difficulties now began in earnest, with Taunay drowning in the Guaporé and nearly all passengers falling ill with various fevers. Alarmingly, Langsdorff fell into episodes of delirium and eventually went insane.
The two parties reunited in Belém and returned to Rio in 1829, after which the unfortunate Langsdorff returned to Europe. Riedel took a break in St. Petersburg from 1830-1831, where he was handsomely rewarded for his work, but returned to make more collections around Rio, São Paolo, Goyaz and Minas Gerais from 1831-1835. In 1836 he accepted a permanent position at the National Museum in Rio, founding its department of botany and botanic garden. He continued to collect plants, during 1838-1839 accompanying the French botanist J.B.A. Guillemin, who had come to study tea cultivation. Their collections together were returned to Paris.
At this time Riedel also published a manual of Brazilian agriculture (1839) with Adrien Taunay’s brother, Charles. He also wished to publish his observations of the Langsdorff expedition and applied for permission to edit the baron’s notes, too. However, it was impossible to access Langsdorff’s materials until 1856, when a dispute over rights to them was finally resolved and the botanical collections were catalogued. (The St. Petersburg Botanical Garden should legally have received everything from the expedition, but many items from the expedition had gone to the Academy of Sciences.) The first account of the voyage (fast being forgotten in Russia) was finally published in 1875-1876 by another relative of Taunay, who had in his possession the diary of expedition member Hercules Florence. Riedel described relatively few taxa himself but collected hundreds of new species, many of which were named after him. The genera Riedelia C.F. Meisner and Riedeliella Harms are also both named in his honour.
Sources:
Anon., 1894, Botanische Jahrbücher für Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie, 18(44): 10-21
Anon., 1979, Huntia, 3(2): 124
R.J. Barman, 1971, "The Forgotten Journey: Georg Heinrich Langsdorff and the Russian Imperial Scientific Expedition to Brazil, 1821-1829," Terrae Incognitae, 3: 67-96
F.W. Pennel "Historical Sketch", in F. Verdoorn, 1945, Plants and Plant Science in Latin America: 43
O. Ryding, 2002, "Count F.C. Raben's Brazilian herbaria", Taxon, 51(2): 369-376
Wikipedia, Ludwig Riedel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Riedel.
