Dahl, Eiliff   (1916 - 1993)

He was born on 7 December 1916 in Kristiania, Norway; died at Ås, Norway, on 17 March 1993. He was a Norwegian botanist and politician for the Labour Party.

His interest in lichens started with an early friendship he developed with Professor Bernt Lynge. Thanks to Lynge, Dahl was able to take part in the 1936 Heimland botanical expedition to eastern Svalbard and Kong Karls Land, and then a Danish-Norwegian expedition to Greenland the next year.

His collections from these excursions were used as part of his cand. real. thesis that he presented to the University of Oslo in 1942.

During the German occupation of Norway he took part in resistance work, and was a member of the clandestine intelligence organization XU. After fleeing to neutral Sweden and later to the United Kingdom, he served with the Norwegian High Command in London.

He made contributions to the field of lichenology through his work on lichen chemistry and taxonomy, particularly his studies of Arctic flora. His most important publication was Studies in the Macrolichen Flora of SW Greenland (1950), which described several new lichen taxa. Dahl served as a professor of botany at the Norwegian College of Agriculture from 1965, and later became a board member of the Labour Party from 1965 to 1977.

During 1970-1971 he took sabbatical in Australia. He was a visiting professor at the ANU in 1970 during which time he gave a short course about lichens. He also prepared identification keys to many Australian genera and these keys remained useful for many years. One of the people who attended Dahl's course was the organic chemist John ('Jack') Elix, then a lecturer in the ANU's chemistry department. Elix accompanied Dahl on a few field trips and was hooked on lichens ever after.

Throughout his career, he maintained connections between lichenology and other botanical disciplines, creating identification keys that proved valuable to researchers across Scandinavia and Australia.

Source: Extracted from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilif_Dahl
https://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/DAHL1916.htm
https://www.anbg.gov.au/lichen/history-3.html
Portrait Photo: https://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/DAHL1916.htm

Collecting localities for 'Dahl, E.' from AVH (2025)

Data from 1,330 specimens