Rudolf Mansfeld

Rudolf Mansfeld (1901 to 1960) was a German botanist and agricultural scientist. For more than twenty years he was a curator at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, where he specialized in orchids and spurges. After World War II he took a position as a laboratory technician at the Gatersleben Institute at the request of the agriculturalist Hans Stubbe, succeeded Werner Rothmaler as departmental director in 1949 and in his last ten years there was in charge of the department of systematics. As an agricultural scientist he developed principles for the classification of cultivated plants and gave a scientific basis for the establishment and preservation of large collections of cultivated plants, the gene banks. He is remembered for the encyclopedia of agricultural and horticultural crops, the Verzeichnis landwirtschaftlicher und gärtnerischer Kulturpflanzen, later published in English as Mansfeld's Encyclopedia of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops.