American botanist who worked for many years in the Philippines. Born in Vandyne, Wisconsin, Adolph Elmer attended Washington State College and Stanford University, where he gained his MA in 1903. Between 1896 and this time he made many plant collections in the western U.S. (especially California). From 1903 Elmer lived in the Philippines, initially in the employ of the Bureau of Science as a plant collector. After two years he left the Bureau and worked independently, collecting plants both in the Philippines and in other parts of Asia, such as Borneo and Malaysia (1921-1923) and China (1907, 1915 and 1922), selling a large number of specimens to Harvard, Geneva and Kew.

Elmer was editor of the Leaflets of Philippine Botany, in which more than 1,500 new taxa were described, mostly by Elmer himself. His private type collection, held in the Philippine National Herbarium, was destroyed during the Japanese invasion in the Second World War. Elmer died of natural causes in Manila in 1942, soon after this invasion.

Sources:
E.B. Copeland, 1949, Philippine Journal of Science, 78: 1-4
G. Sayre, 1975, "Cryptogamae Exsiccatae: an annotated bibliography of exsiccatae of algae, lichens, hepaticae, and musci. V. Unpublished Exsiccatae: I. Collectors", Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 19(3): 317
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/FMCollectors/E/ElmerADE.htm, accessed 8 November 2011.