#Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland

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Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland | Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre, Paris, 1813.

#Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland #Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland | Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre Paris 1813 #french explorer and botanist #flowers #nature #art #artist #art work #art world #art news

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Humboldt's Chimborazo Map:

German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt loved plants. In his early years, he studied the species that grow in the artificial lights of the mines where he worked as a student at the university of Freiberg in Saxony. During his expedition in the Americas (1799-1804) together with French botanist Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland, they collected more than 60,000 plants from 6,000 species, 3,000 still unknown at the time.

In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland also compiled the first map showing the attitudinal ranges of plant species along the slopes of the 20,549 ft high Chimborazo.  Humboldt noted than specific plants can only be found or dominate at specific altitudes and that this altitude zonation of the vegetation depends from the temperature. Plants needing a tropical or temperate climate are found downslope or in the valleys.

As temperature decreases with elevation by almost 0.6°C every 328 ft, cold tolerant species dominate upslope and cold adapted species grow in the summit region of the mountain. This insight and the famous diagram were published three years later in the book Essai sur la geographie des plantes.

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