Harald Lindberg was a leading Finnish botanist in the 1900s. He studied a wide range of taxa, including subfossils and bryophtyes from the borderlands of Finland and Russia. He was also an authority on Mediterranean plants, especially from Spain and Morocco. He described more than 150 new species from Fennoscandia and the Mediterranean region and compiled the major Plantae Finlandiae Exsiccatae between 1906 and 1945.
Lindberg was born in Helsinki and studied natural sciences at the Imperial Alexander University (University of Helsinki), graduating in 1894. His father was the well-known bryologist Sextus Otto Lindberg and Harald also went on to specialise in botany while working as a secondary school teacher from 1896-1904. He married in 1895. In addition to his teaching work, Lindberg assisted in the laboratory of the Helsinki Botanical Institution from 1897-1898 and was appointed curator at the Botanical Museum of Helsinki University.
Gaining his doctorate in 1910 with a thesis on Alchemilla vulgaris, Lindberg was appointed the first custodian in the museum, where he remained until retirement in 1941. Five years later he was made an honorary Professor.
Over the course of his career Lindberg built an international reputation as a taxonomist, and greatly contributed to the herbarium in Helsinki, in which he deposited his personal collection of 50,000 sheets, representing 13,000 taxa. He also worked for the Finnish peatland cultivation society (Suomen Suoviljelysyhdistys) from 1899-1912.
Lindberg made many collections in East Fennoscandia between 1890 and 1943, and in eastern Europe in 1905, following the International Botanical Congress in Vienna. He studied the flora of Sicily and Tunisia in 1924 and of Spain and Morocco in 1926. He also visited Britain and Ireland in 1932, where he especially collected Taraxacum. He made collections in Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus in 1939.
Lindberg was also a keen collector of Coleoptera, on which he concentrated after retirement.
Having been a member of the Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica since he was 18 years old, Lindberg was made an honorary member in 1941. He was elected to the Societas Scietiarum Fennica in 1917 and to the Uppsala Royal Society in 1948. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded him the Linnaeus Medal in 1926.
Sources:
H. Palm, 1962, "In memoriam. Harald Lindberg", Entomologisk Tidskrift, 83: 309-310
H. Väre, 2010, "Harald Lindberg – a Finnish botanist", Memoranda Societatis pro Fauna et Flora Fennica, 86: 1-27.
