Dr. Friedrich Ludwig Emil Diels (24 September 1874 – 30 November 1945), was a German botanist.

Diels was born in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, the son of the classical scholar Hermann Alexander Diels

Hermann Alexander Diels

Hermann Alexander Diels was a German classical scholar.-Biography:He was educated at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and in 1886 became professor ordinarius of classical philology at the latter institution....

. From 1900 to 1902 he traveled together with Ernst Pritzel through South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, Java

Java

Java is an island of Indonesia. With a population of 135 million , it is the world's most populous island, and one of the most densely populated regions in the world. It is home to 60% of Indonesia's population. The Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, is in west Java...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 and New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. Shortly before the first world war he travelled New Guinea

New Guinea

New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...

 and in the 1930s in Ecuador

Ecuador

Ecuador , officially the Republic of Ecuador is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, along with Chile, that do not have a border...

. Especially his collections of plants from Australia and Ecuador, which contained numerous holotype

Holotype

A holotype is a single physical example of an organism, known to have been used when the species was formally described. It is either the single such physical example or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype...

s, enriched the knowledge of the concerning floras. His monography on the Droseraceae

Droseraceae

Droseraceae is the botanical name for a family of flowering plants. The family is also known under its common name, the sundew family.It consists of carnivorous plants: besides the sundews, the genus Drosera, it also contains the even more-famous Venus fly trap Dionaea muscipula...

 from 1906 is still a standard.

The majority of his collections were stored at the famous botanical garden in Berlin-Dahlem, whose vicedirector he had been since 1913, becoming its director in 1921 until 1945. His collections were destroyed there during an air raid in 1943. He died in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

.