German botanist and explorer. Carl Friedrich Philipp van Martius is famous as an explorer of Brazil and for having initiated what is to this day the only complete flora of that country. The Flora Brasiliensis describes a total of 22,767 species, including 19,629 plants native to Brazil and 5,689 new to science.

Between December 1817 and August 1820, he made an epic journey of 10,000 km through Brazil with Johan Baptist Spix, under the sponsorship of the emperor of Austria, Franz I. Disembarking at Rio de Janeiro, the two men travelled to São Paulo and from there through Minas Gerais to the South of Bahia. They spent several months collecting throughout Bahia and in the northeastern states of Pernambuco, Piauí, and Maranhão, before embarking for Belém in July 1818. The final stage of their expedition took them upriver to Manaus, where they separated, Spix heading to the watershed of the Rio Negro, Martius following the Sollimões and Rio Japurá to Belém. The expedition was completed without serious mishap, both explorers returning to Europe via Lisbon and reaching Munich in December 1820 with their entire collection intact, (some 6,500 botanical specimens and thousands more zoological specimens and ethnological artifacts).

They produced an account of their journey, Reise in Brasilien, but Spix's death in 1826 left Martius with the task of publishing the largely unstudied zoological collections as well as his own botanical discoveries from the expedition. His Nova Genera et Species Plantarum was published in three volumes between 1823 and 1832, a fourth, on cryptogams, Icones Plantarum Cryptogamicarum Brasiliensium, in 1827. Palms, of special interest to Martius since his travels, were the subject of a multivolume work Historia Naturalis Palmarum, which appeared over three decades. In 1839, at the urging of Prince Metternich, Martius undertook the even more ambitious project of a Flora of Brazil, with editorial assistance from Stephan L. Endlicher and, later, Eduard Fenzl and contributions from some 60 German and foreign botanists. The last of the 140 fascicles of Flora Brasiliensis, which received sponsorship from Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and the Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, was published in 1906, under the editorship of Ignatz Urban, more than forty years after Martius's death.