Heinrich Mayr
Heinrich Mayr was a German forest scientist, dendrologist and university professor whose research and teaching shaped forest botany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His standard botanical author abbreviation is Mayr.
Life and career
Mayr was born in Landsberg am Lech, the son of the Bavarian senior forester Clemens Mayr. After the Ludwigsgymnasium in Munich he spent two years at the Royal Forestry Academy in Aschaffenburg, followed by a one-year political-economy course at the University of Munich, where he joined the. From 1879 he served as a trainee forester in the Alpine foreland and, having passed the state examination in 1880, became assistant to the eminent mycologist Robert Hartig at the Bavarian Forestry Research Station. Under Hartig he earned a doctorate with a Latin thesis on the birch parasites Fomitopsis betulina and Phellinus laevigatus, and the same year submitted his habilitation on the comparative anatomy of secretory organs in Norway spruce and European larch.Supported by the Bavarian forestry administration, Mayr then undertook a two-year circumnavigation to assess the silvicultural potential of foreign tree species for European forestry. From 1888 to 1891 he taught botany at the Imperial Forestry School in Tokyo, gaining first-hand knowledge of the Japanese flora. His travel observations appeared in three influential monographs that combined systematic, geographical and economic perspectives and warned presciently against the destructive logging practices then prevalent in the United States. In 1893 the University of Munich appointed him to the chair of silviculture and forest production science as successor to Karl Gayer. With Hartig he established an experimental arboretum of exotic trees in the Grafrath teaching forest and, through further European study tours, became an authority on seed provenance. A third world tour in 1902 with Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria inspired his popular illustrated handbook Fremdländische Wald- und Parkbäume für Europa published in 1906.
Mayr maintained wide contacts—he chaired the Bavarian Horticultural Society, corresponded with the International Union of Forest Research Organizations and attracted foreign students such as Aimo Cajander and. His attempt to supersede Gayer's high-forest doctrine with a small-stand approach in Waldbau auf naturgesetzlicher Grundlage provoked sharp practical criticism, yet the textbook reached a second edition and remains a landmark in close-to-nature silviculture. On 19 January 1911 he collapsed from a stroke while lecturing and died five days later, leaving two sons and two daughters. He is buried in Munich's Waldfriedhof.