Some Biogeographers, Evolutionists and Ecologists:
Chrono-Biographical Sketches

Stegmann, Boris Karlowitsch (Russia 1898-1975)
ornithology, zoogeography

Stegmann's German heritage landed him in trouble during the World War II period. He lost his job and was exiled to Central Asia along with many other ethnic Germans, but was able to take advantage of the situation by immersing himself in studies of the faunas there. He had already attracted attention as a perceptive and statistically creative zoogeographer, his 1938 work on Palaearctic birds having identified nine Old World faunal centers whose various rates of geographical interspersing were graphically figured in a now famous map. Stegmann (also "Shtegman") also conducted important studies on avian morphology leading to revisions of many higher taxa within the birds; at the same time he gave much attention to subspecific taxonomy, and in turn to phylogeny.

--born in Pskow, Russia, on 25 December 1898.
--1921: hired as technician at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in Leningrad; in 1928 advanced to research assistant
--1934: awarded D.Sc. in biology, summa cum laude
--1934: publishes an influential review of the subspecies of the larger gulls
--1938: publishes his Principes Généraux des Subdivisions Ornithogéographiques de la Région Paléarctique [text in Russian]
--1938-1939: incarcerated on false charges
--1941-1946: as ethnic German is exiled to the delta of the Ili River in Kazakhstan
--1941-1954: works in Kazakhstan; among other activities studies the impact of introduced muskrats in the area
--1964: publishes his Guide to the Birds of the U.S.S.R. [in Russian], with A. I. Ivanov
--1968: publishes (in English translation) his Biology and Control of Dreissena (zebra mussels), with N. A. Limanova
--dies on 28 December 1975.
--1978: posthumously publishes his Relationships of the Superorders Alectoromorphae and Charadriomorphae (Aves): A Comparative Study of the Avian Hand [in English]

--Journal für Ornithologie, Vol. 117(3) (1976): 395-396. [in German]