Franz Petrak

Franz Petrak (born October 9, 1886 in Mährisch-Weißkirchen , † October 9, 1973 in Vienna ) was a Moravian-Austrian botanist and mycologist . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is “ Petr. "

Life

Petrak was the son of the head gardener of the k. u. k. Military high school in Mährisch-Weißkirchen. From 1906 he studied natural sciences and mathematics for teaching and especially botany at the University of Vienna under Richard Wettstein, among others . In 1913 he received his doctorate (on the daisy family of the genus Kratzdisteln , Cirsium ) and was then a teacher at a grammar school in Vienna. After military service in the First World War (accounting sergeant in Galicia and Albania), he was a private scholar in Mährisch-Weißkirchen from 1918 to 1938 (where he lived on the income as a reference for mycology in Just's Botanical Annual Reports ) and from 1938 on with the Natural History Museum.

He had an extensive private herbarium and published over 500 scientific papers mostly in mycology. His specialty was microscopic forms of sac fungi and Fungi imperfecti . As a mycologist, he was essentially self-taught, who did not have much literature available (Rabenhorst's cryptogam flora of Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and who worked with the Berlin mycologist Hans Sydow and published Mycologici in his annales . Due to the political situation, he went to Vienna in 1938, where he worked in the botanical department of the Natural History Museum in Vienna until 1951 . He supervised the cryptogam collection and published the Kryptogamae exsiccatae . During World War II he organized the only one of unrecovered scientists of the museum to ensure the botanical collections of the museum (in the basement of a bank in Vienna and castles in Lower Austria), where he in 1945 the partial loss of in late May Kleinhöflein accommodated stocks realized by fire. In 1950/51 he was visiting scholar at the mushroom herbarium of the US Department of Agriculture in Beltsville , Maryland . In 1951 he retired, but continued to work scientifically, partly because, as a contract employee, he was not entitled to a pension. From 1947 he published the continuation of the Annales Mycologici under the name Sydowia .

He first described several species of the composer genus Cirsium and wrote a monograph of the European and North American species of the genus (the planned processing of Asia failed because of the then suitable study material from Japan). He first described 400 genera and thousands of new mushroom species, although not all of them existed.

He had been married since 1917 and had a son. He was considered an eccentric and loner who never aspired to an academic position and taught his son himself. At times he held mycological courses at the Natural History Museum.

His herbarium with around 100,000 individual specimens of mushrooms from all over the world is in the Vienna Natural History Museum, which it bought from Petrak during his lifetime. In his obituary in 1978, Riedl complained about the chaotic situation, which was partly due to the fact that Petrak was recently too ill for the inventory to be organized.

Honors

The species of mushrooms Petrakia Syd. & P.Syd. , Petrakiella Syd. , Petrakiopeltis Bat., AFVital & Cif. , Franzpetrakia Thirum. & Pavgi , Petrakiopsis Subram. & KRCReddy , Petrakomyces Subram. & K.Ramakr. and Petrakina Cif. are named in his honor.

Fonts

• with H. Sydow: The genera of the Pyrenomycetes, Sphaeropsideen and Melanconiaen. Part I: The phaeosporen Sphaerosideen and the genus Macrophoma, in: Repertorium novarum specierum regni vegetabilis , supplement 42 (1927): 1-551
• About the Pseudosphaeriaceen v. H. and their importance for the special systematics of the Pyrenomycetes, Annales Mycologici 21 (1923): 30-69

literature

• Harald Riedl: Franz Petrak in memory, Annalen Naturhist. Mus. Wien, 81, 1978, pp. 661–664 (PDF; 1.02 MB; German)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .