United States plant geographer. The son of the eminent Professor of Geography Carl O. Sauer, Jonathan Sauer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Berkeley, California. After graduating from Berkeley, he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin but his studies were interrupted when the United States entered the Second World War. After some time on the west coast of South America working for the Rockefeller Foundation, he spent the remainder of the war at the Pentagon as a weather specialist for the Army Air Force. He completed a PhD at Washington University in St Louis after the war, and joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. In 1967 he returned to California and until his retirement was a professor in the geography department of UCLA. His research on beach vegetation, partially funded by the Office of Naval Research, resulted in a number of published books, Cayman Islands Seashore Vegetation (1983), Plants and Man on the Seychelles Coast (1967), Plant Migration: The Pattern of Geographical Patterning in Seed Plant Species (1988), and Historical Geography of Crop Plants (1993).

Sources:
T.S. Brothers, B. Fredrich, D.W. Gade, C. Kimber, 2009, "Jonathan D. Sauer (1918-2008): perspectives on his life and work in Latin America and beyond", Journal of Latin American Geography, 8(1): 165-169.