U.S. botanist at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. Breedlove's major work has been on the flora of Chiapas, Mexico, and the folk taxonomy of the region's Mayan cultures. He trained at Stanford University where he was awarded his doctorate in 1968. His thesis dealt with the systematics of the Fuchsia section Encliandra (Onagraceae). In 1969 Breedlove was appointed curator of the California Academy of Sciences herbarium, where he also chaired the botany department and is now curator emeritus and a lifetime fellow. He began working with the ethnographer Robert M. Laughlin in 1960 compiling an ethnobotanical inventory of the plants known by the Tzotzil Maya people of Zincantan in Chiapas. From hundreds of Tzotzil names for plant varieties they eventually identified 30 genera and 1,484 species, published in the volume The Flowering of Man: A Tzotzil Botany of Zinacantán (2000, previously published in 1993 as two volumes in Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology). Breedlove also spearheaded work on the Flora of Chiapas, authoring its introductory volume (1981).

Sources:
D.E. Breedlove, 1981, An Introduction to the Flora of Chiapas
D.E. Breedlove and R.M. Laughlin, 2000, "The flowering of man: a Tzotzil botany of Zinacantán".