Ira Loren Wiggins
Ira Loren Wiggins was an American botanist, Curator of the Dudley Herbarium, and Director of the Natural History Museum at Stanford University. He was a Stanford faculty member from 1929 until his retirement in 1964. He was the first recipient of the Fellow's Medal of the California Academy of Sciences. His Flora of Baja California is a standard work on the botany of the Baja peninsula and on the many islands of the Gulf of California.
Wiggins attended Occidental College as an undergraduate and received his M.A. at Stanford, studying with LeRoy Abrams, and where he won a university fellowship in botany in 1927. He earned his PhD in 1930 with a thesis on the flora of San Diego County. Wiggins made several botanical collecting trips to the Sonoran Desert, collaborating with Forrest Shreve in a description of the vegetation and flora of the North American Sonoran Desert including portions of Arizona, New Mexico, California, Sonora, Baja California Sur, and Baja California. He published extensively on the floras of North American desert landscapes, the flora of the Arctic Slope of Alaska, and flora of the Galapagos Islands.
Starting in May 1944, Wiggins spent nine months in Ecuador as part of the Mision de Cinchona. He was appointed head of Johns Hopkins University's Arctic research laboratory in Point Barrow, Alaska in 1950.Legacy
Wiggins is commemorated in the scientific names of two species of lizards, Phrynosoma wigginsi and Xantusia wigginsi.Selected publications
