Woldemar (or Vladimir) Tranzschel was a St. Petersburg-based mycologist specialising in the Uredineae.
Tranzschel was born in St. Petersburg and studied botany at the city's university, where he mixed with likeminded students including Andrej Krasnov and Nikolai Kuznetsov. He soon began to concentrate on cryptogams and his undergraduate thesis was published under the title An enumeration of Uredineae of St. Petersburg Province (1888).
Following his graduation, in 1889 Tranzschel was appointed assistant in cryptogrammic botany and curator at the St. Petersburg University Botanical Museum. After one year he moved to the Institute of Forestry as assistant to Professor Borodin, and continued his mycological research. In 1897 he spent a period working at the Bologoe biological station and in 1901 published an enumeration of the fungi of the Valdai region.
Transferring to the University of Warsaw in 1898, he was employed as an assistant in plant morphology and systematics for two years. He then returned to St. Petersburg as Curator of the Botanical Museum of the Academy of Sciences. He was later appointed Senior Botanist, in which position he remained from 1912 until his death.
Devoting his life to the study of Uredineae and fungal phylogeny, one of Tranzschel's important achievements became known as the Tranzschel method, which demonstrated the relationship between aecidial stages of rusts and their teleutospores on host plants. He was also an authority on the genus Triphragmium and towards the end of his life published the major work Rusts of the USSR (in Russian, 1939), describing more than a thousand species.
In terms of collecting, Tranzschel was particularly active in the region around St. Petersburg, including Novgorod, and made numerous expeditions in Central Asian Russia, traversing Kyrgyzstan and the Alay mountains in 1900. He also collected In Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1899 and 1903. In 1927 and 1929 he made two trips to the Ussuri and Primorsk regions of Siberia, and made extensive collections in the Crimea.
Tranzschel collaborated with Arthur Jaczewski and V.L. Komarov on editing Fungi Rossiae exsiccati (1895-1900) and from 1910-1912 worked with V.A. Serebriannikov on Mycotheca rossica. Both works appeared in seven fascicles.
Tranzschel died during the siege of Leningrad in 1942, which had a severe impact on his health.
Sources:
V.C. Asmous, 1945, "Prof. V.A. Tranzschel, 1868-1942", Mycologia, 37(2): 271-274
A.S. Bondartsev, 1938, "The seventieth anniversary of the birth of Prof. V.A. Tranzschel", Priroda, 1938(4): 147-153
R. Singer, 1944, Science, 99: 443.
