Friedrich August Körnicke

Friedrich August Körnicke (1828 to 1908) was a German agronomist and botanist born in Pratau, now part of Wittenberg. He took his doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1856, worked as curator of the herbarium at the botanical gardens in St. Petersburg, taught at the Waldau Agricultural Academy near Königsberg from 1858 to 1867 and then succeeded Julius Sachs as professor of botany at the Agricultural Academy of Poppelsdorf in Bonn, a post he kept until 1898. He was a leading authority on cereal grains, especially wheat, investigated agricultural crops and improved grain varieties at Bonn, and with Hugo Werner wrote the landmark textbook Handbuch des Getreidebaues. He also made significant studies of the flora of the Rhineland and was taxonomic authority for many taxa in the families Eriocaulaceae and Marantaceae.