Erik Leonard Ekman

Erik Leonard Ekman (14 October 1883, – 15 January 1931, Santiago de los Caballeros) was a Swedish botanist and explorer .

Erik Leonard Ekman was born into a low-income household with five children on October 14, 1883. Due to economic difficulties, the family moved to the central-Swedish town of Jönköping when he was eleven. Here, while at school, his passion for botanical collecting started. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1907 at Lund University in southern Sweden and was offered free passage on a ship to Argentina with a Swedish shipping company. He spent three months in Misiones collecting plants, aided greatly by the local Swedish colony. While there, he was offered a position as the Regnellian amanuensis at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in , which he gladly accepted. He started his service at the museum in 1908. Thanks to financial support from the Regnell fund, he was able to travel widely through Europe and study with many of the prominent botanists of the time.

Ekman presented his doctoral dissertation at Lund in 1914. In the same year, he was to participate in the third Regnellian expedition to South America. His goal was Brazil, but Ekman was given an assignment from professors Ignatius Urban (from Berlin) and C. Lindman (from Stockholm) to make short stops on Cuba (one month) and Hispaniola (eight months), to collect specimens for Urban's Symbolae Antillanae botanical project. Ekman agreed to do so, but under protest. His trip to Brazil was further delayed for two years by the onset of World War I, political unrest in Haiti, and a plague epidemic in Cuba.

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