Dmitri Nikiforowitsch Kaigorodow

Dmitri Nikiforowitsch Kaigorodow

Dmitri Nikiforowitsch Kaigorodow ( Russian Дмитрий Никифорович Кайгородов ; born August 31, ^jul. / 12. September  1846 ^greg. In Polotsk ; † 11. February 1924 in Leningrad ) was a Russian forest scientist , ornithologist and university teachers .

Life

Dmitri Kaigorodow, son of Major General Nikifor Ivanovich Kaigorodow (1810–1882), completed his training in the Polotsk Cadet Corps in 1863 , where his father was a mathematics lecturer. This was followed by military training at the Constantine Artillery School (1863–1864) and at the Michail Artillery School (1864–1865) in St. Petersburg . Then he took up his service in Congress Poland . In 1868 Kaigorodow switched to the state-owned Okhta gunpowder factory (on the Ochta River in St. Petersburg) as an officer . At the same time he studied at the St. Petersburg Forest Academy .

In 1872, after a leave of absence from military service, he received his doctorate for his thesis on the production of acetic acid lime (important for rendering wood incombustible) as a candidate in agriculture and forestry . In 1873 he was transferred to the Forester Corps and sent abroad for two years by the Ministry of State Lands for further training in forestry. He studied at the Tharandt Forestry University and at the ETH Zurich and practiced in forestry in Switzerland , Germany , Austria , France and Sweden . After his return in 1875 he was given the chair for forestry technology at the St. Petersburg Forest Academy, which he held until 1905. In 1882 he was appointed professor .

Kaigorodov's work concerned the testing of wood by technical means, questions of pyrolysis , and he developed tables for assessing the quality of the wood. In 1883 he was awarded a prize by the forestry committee for the development of a device for measuring the strength of wood and the development of the first Russian forest dictionary . 1889-1891 he taught Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov in natural history .

Since his first public lecture On Flowers as a Source of Joy in 1872, Kaigorodov had tirelessly contributed to the popularization of Russian nature. In 1882 at the All-Russian Conference of Foresters , he gave a lecture on the protection of important forests and the consequences of their destruction. Since 1887 he has given lectures in the St. Petersburg Teaching Museum of the Committee for the Promotion of Reading .

Since 1881 Kaigorodow devoted a lot of time to phenology . He was one of the founders of the Russian Society of Friends of the Whole Natural Sciences , whose phenological department he organized and directed. In 1885 he founded a network to study the bioclimatic regionalization of the European part of Russia. He created maps of bird migration and tables illustrating the benefits and harms caused by the birds (1891). The results of his observations have been published regularly in the Nature Bulletin since 1888 . Scientific papers have appeared in many different journals. Since 1889 he published essays on natural history in youth magazines.

In 1901, the Ministry of National Education introduced the natural history program developed by Kaigorodow for the first three years of middle school. The program was not limited to botany and zoology , but also included forests , gardens , meadows , ponds and rivers according to the teachings of Friedrich Young . In the last years of his life, Kaigorodov worked in the forest department of the State Institute for Agronomic Research .

Kaigorodov's grave is located in the park of the Petersburg Forest Academy. In 1929, the Council of People's Commissars approved the Commission for the Care of the Memory of Kaigorodov to conduct a public collection for a monument and the publication of its work. The Phenology Commission of the Russian Geographical Society bears Kaigorodov's name. In 1947 the State Phenological Station with his name was founded in the Leningrad Forest Academy.

Honors

• Honorary professorship at the Petersburg Forest Academy
• Honorary membership of the History Society of Vitebsk

literature

• Kaigorodow, Dmitri Nikiforowitsch . Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary , St. Petersburg 1890–1907 (Russian, accessed February 1, 2016).
• National Academy of Sciences of Belarus : Dmitri Kaigorodov (Belarusian, accessed February 1, 2016).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Essigsaurer Kalk , Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, Volume 6. Leipzig 1906, pp. 122–123 (accessed on February 1, 2016).
2. ↑ Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin : How It All Began: The Prison Novel . Columbia University Press , New York 1998, p. 341, ISBN 0-231-10731-5 .