Biography

United States botanist and biologist. When Ira Loren Wiggins, born 1899 in Madison, Wisconsin, entered Occidental College in Los Angeles, he intended to become a Presbyterian minister not a botanist. But Dr Frank Smiley, then a botanist at the college and a former Stanford University graduate, persuaded him to change his mind, and in 1924 Wiggins, too, enrolled at Stanford. There he gained his Master's with the thesis ' A Systematic Study of the Pacific Coast Malvaceae,' later followed by his PhD dissertation Flora of San Diego County, California.

Soon after his appointment as an assistant professor of botany at Stanford, Professor Wiggins set off on a series of trips studying the flora of Baja California, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. There he collaborated with Forrest Shreve of the Desert Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Arizona. While Shreve wrote the ecological and descriptive vegetational analysis of the Sonoran Desert, Wiggins wrote the floral. In 1936 he was promoted to associate professor, and after Stanford merged its botany and zoological departments, he became full professor. A curatorial appointment in the Dudley Herbarium followed, and from 1942 to 1962 he became director of the Natural History Museum.

In 1949 Wiggins travelled to Pt Barrow, Alaska, to conduct botanical research there under the sponsorship of Office of Naval Research, returning the following summer. The results of this expedition were A Flora of the Alaskan Arctic Slope (Wiggins and Thomas), and the appointment of Wiggins as director of the Arctic Research Laboratory at Pt Barrow where he worked during the early 1950's. Another expedition in 1964 saw Wiggins taking part in the Galapagos International Scientific Project studying the flora of the islands made famous a century before by Charles Darwin, and culminating in The Flora of the Galapagos Islands (1971).

After retiring from Stanford as Professor of Biology Emeritus, Wiggins continued teaching at California University, Fullerton, and the University of Florida, as well as researching and writing papers, his last major work being A Flora of Baja California. An all-round naturalist, and a fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America and the California Academy of Sciences, Professor Wiggins made over 50,000 collections of plants as well as major contributions to zoological collections. He died in Palo Alto in late 1987.

Sources:
J.H. Thomas, L.R. Blinks and G.E. Lindsay, "Memorial Resolution, Ira Loren Wiggins (1899-1987)", Stanford University Memorials:
http://histsoc.stanford.edu/pdfmem/WigginsI.pdf.