Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler was a German botanist. He is notable for his work on plant taxonomy and phytogeography, such as Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien, edited with Karl A. E. von Prantl.
The history of phycology is the history of the scientific study of algae. Human interest in plants as food goes back into the origins of the species, and knowledge of algae can be traced back more than two thousand years. However, only in the last three hundred years has that knowledge evolved into a rapidly developing science.
Ernst Johannes Schmidt was a Danish biologist credited with discovering in 1920 that European eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. Before this people in North America and Europe had wondered where the small glass eels, or elvers, came from.
Fredrik Christian Emil Børgesen was a Danish botanist and phycologist. He graduated in botany from the University of Copenhagen and was subsequently employed as an assistant at the Botanical Museum (1893–1900). His doctoral thesis dealt with the marine algae of the Faroe Islands (1904). Later, he became librarian at the Library of the Botanical Garden (1900–1935).
Johannes Reinke was a German botanist and philosopher who was a native of Ziethen, Lauenburg. He is remembered for his research of benthic marine algae.
Grethe Berit Rytter Hasle was a Norwegian planktologist. Among the first female professors of natural science at the University of Oslo, she specialized in the study of phytoplankton.
Trygve Braarud was a Norwegian botanist. He specialized in marine biology, and was affiliated with the University of Oslo for most of his career.
Pseudo-nitzschia is a marine planktonic diatom genus that accounts for 4.4% of pennate diatoms found worldwide. Some species are capable of producing the neurotoxin domoic acid (DA), which is responsible for the neurological disorder in humans known as amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP). Currently, 58 species are known, 28 of which have been shown to produced DA. It was originally hypothesized that only dinoflagellates could produce harmful algal toxins, but a deadly bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia occurred in 1987 in the bays of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and led to an outbreak of ASP. Over 100 people were affected by this outbreak after consuming contaminated mussels; three people died. Since this event, no additional deaths have been attributed to ASP, though the prevalence of toxic diatoms and DA has increased worldwide. This anomaly is likely due to increased awareness of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and their implications for human and ecosystem health.
Isabella Aiona Abbott was an educator, phycologist, and ethnobotanist from Hawaii. The first native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in science, she became a leading expert on Pacific marine algae.
Hans Christian Lyngbye was a Danish priest and botanist, specialising in algae.
Akashiwo sanguinea is a species of marine dinoflagellates well known for forming blooms that result in red tides. The organism is unarmored (naked). Therefore, it lacks a thick cellulose wall, the theca, common in other genera of dinoflagellates. Reproduction of the phytoplankton species is primarily asexual.
Mesodinium chamaeleon is a ciliate of the genus Mesodinium. It is known for being able to consume and maintain algae endosymbiotically for days before digesting the algae. It has the ability to eat red and green algae, and afterwards using the chlorophyll granules from the algae to generate energy, turning itself from being a heterotroph into an autotroph. The species was discovered in January 2012 outside the coast of Nivå, Denmark by professor Øjvind Moestrup.
Narayana Balakrishnan Nair (1927–2010) was a marine biologist, ecologist and the founder president of Kerala Science Congress. He was known for his advocacy of trawling ban during monsoon seasons which was later accepted and imposed by the Government of Kerala. A Jawaharlal Nehru fellow, Nair was an elected fellow of all the major Indian science academies as well as the Zoological Society of London. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1971, for his contributions to biological sciences. He received the fourth highest Indian civilian honor of the Padma Shri in 1984.
Sebsebe Demissew is a Professor of Plant Systematics and Biodiversity at Addis Ababa University and Executive Director of the Gullele Botanic Garden in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
William Albert Setchell was an American botanist and marine phycologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he headed the Botany Department. Among his publications are the Phycotheca Boreali-Americana, a multi-volume specimen collection of dried algae, and the Algae of Northwestern America, a reference work.
William Randolph Taylor was an American botanist known as an expert in phycology.
Alan Cribb is an Australian botanist and mycologist and an expert in marine and freshwater algae and seaweeds. He has also written on native and wild foods of Australia. The standard author abbreviation Cribb is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Axel Dalberg Poulsen is a Danish naturalist, botanist, and curator. His research interests are the flora of Denmark and its surroundings, taxonomy and biology of the Orchidaceae, and conservation biology.
Anders Munk was a Danish mycologist. He was an expert of the fungal group colloquially known as the Pyrenomycetes, and best known for his 1957 work "Danish Pyrenomycetes".
Mustafa Shameel was a Pakistani scientist and educator noted for his work in the fields of barobiology, phycochemistry and taxonomy of algae. He spent most of his five decades' academic career at the University of Karachi.
