Biography

Austro-Bohemian botanist in St. Petersburg. Franz Josef Ruprecht travelled much of his adopted country and produced several important texts on the Russian flora, working for the Russian Academy of Sciences. His father a supply officer based in Praha, Franz Josef was born in Freiburg, Breisgau, and moved around with his father as he served in the Napoleonic War. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo the Ruprecht family returned to Praha and Franz Josef was schooled there, later becoming an undergraduate at the university (1830-1836). Collecting plants as a student for H.L. Reichenbach he was able to publish Tent amen agrostographia universalis in 1838, the year in which he was named doctor of medicine.

After practising for a year as a physician in Praha, Ruprecht moved to St. Petersburg in 1839 to take up the role of curator of the botanical collections at the Academy of Sciences under C.A. Meyer. Later (1847) he would marry Caroline Meinshausen, who was from Riga, and so he gained Russian citizenship, and the following year became a member of the academy. Ruprecht also worked in the Imperial Botanic Garden as an assistant (1851-1855) and by 1857 was named "Ordinarius" of the academy and director of its botanical museum (1855-1870).

Under the influence of C.B. Trinius (who can be thought of as the founder of the botanical museum) Ruprecht took an interest in the grasses and studied the systematics of this group under his mentor. Later his attention turned to floristics and plant geography and he travelled much of the Russian Empire, publishing several important contributions to the flora of the empire. During the mid 1940s he studied the flora of the Samoyed territory in central-north Russia and the northern Urals, undertaking a great expedition there in 1847-1848 from which he produced a Flora boreali-uralensis (1854). Perhaps his most famous publication, however, is the Flora Ingrica (1860) of the St. Petersburg region, which he also studied from his arrival at the museum. As a phytogeographer Ruprecht was interested in the history of the Russian flora and was one of the first to approach this topic in his "Geobotanical Investigations on Chernozems" (1866).

Sources:
S.G. Shetler, 1967, The Komarov Botanical Institute
F.A. Stafleu and R.S. Cowan, 1976-1998, Taxonomic Literature, 2nd edition (TL-2)
J.D. Hooker, 1846, London Journal of Botany, 5: 531-532.