German botanist. Ignatz (or Ignatius) Urban was the final editor of Martius's Flora Brasiliensis and sole author of Symbolae Antillanae (1898-1928), a multi-volume work which brings together a vast amount of material on West Indian plants: descriptions of new species, monographs of genera, floras of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, notes about nomenclature, chapters on botanical history and plant geography and bibliography.

Born at Warburg in Westphalia, the son of a prosperous brewer, he studied natural science at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, under Alexander Braun and Paul Ascherson. Military training and active service in the Franco-Prussian War interrupted his university course, but in 1873 he was awarded a PhD degree for his dissertation on germination, flower- and fruit-formation in the genus Medicago. This was followed by the publication of a monograph of the genus and a conspectus of its species, varieties and cultivars. He held a teaching post at a school in Lichterfelde until 1878 when he was appointed first assistant, under Wilhelm Eichler, at the Berlin Botanical Garden and Museum. He became curator in 1883 and later, as assistant director, a post he held until his retirement in 1913, he supervised the transfer of the botanical garden to its current site at Dahlem. To avoid a break in his work, he refused an offer of the professorship and directorship of the botanical garden at G⟶ttingen.

Between 1877 and 1889 he contributed accounts of several families to the Flora Brasiliensis and, after Eichler's death, assumed editorship of the work which he carried to completion in 1906. Due to his increasing interest in West Indian flora, his own contributions after 1889 were confined to the introduction, which contains valuable information on collectors and collaborators.

In 1884 he was approached by the German consul and businessman Leopold Krug for help in identifying his plant collections from Puerto Rico. In return Krug provided Urban with financial support to enlarge the herbarium's poorly represented collections of West Indian plants, which enabled fresh botanical explorations of some of the islands. Urban never travelled outside Europe himself but commissioned or was sent material by a number of collectors, including Sintenis, Eggers, Turckheim, Buch, Fuertes, Eckman, and Fawcett. To these he added many other collections obtained by purchase and by exchange, creating what was the world's largest and best studied collection of West Indian plants until its decimation by fire in a bombing raid in 1943. Duplicate West Indian material distributed to other herbaria under the name of Urban is ex herbario and was originally collected by other plant collectors.

His analyses of this material, supplemented by information from other European herbaria, appeared in Engler's Jahrbuch from 1892 to 1897 under the title Addimenta ad cognitionem Florae Indiae Occidentalis and later in the nine large volumes of the Symbolae Antillanae and in his Serta Antillana, a series of 30 numbers begun shortly after his retirement and concluded a year before his death. Other important works are his monographs on Turneraceae (1883) and Loasaceae (1900), the latter with E. Gilg. Besides honorary memberships to many scientific societies, he was a Chevalier of Prussian and Bavarian Orders and an Officer of the Rose of Brazil.

Sources:
Anon, 1931, "Ignatius Urban", Kew Bulletin, 1931: 157
R.A. Howard, 1965, "Ignatius Urban and the Symbolae Antillanae" in I. Urban (ed), A cumulative index to the nine volumes of the Symbolae Antillanae seu fundamenta Florae Ondiae Occidentalis: 1-6
A.B. Rendle, 1931, "Ignatz Urban", Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 142-143: 198-201
P.C. Standley, 1931, "Ignatius Urban", Science, 73(1888): 254-255.