Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826) – documenting in colour Australian biodiversity, including species now extinct

Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826) was one of the few eighteenth-century natural history illustrators, who used a numerical code to document the colouring of organisms while sketching them in the field. He used this on two major expeditions, one to the Mediterranean, resulting in Flora Graeca (ten volumes, 1806–1840) and ‘Fauna Graeca’ (mostly unpublished), the other to Australia as part of the Flinders expedition. The latter was supposed to result in a flora of New Holland, but this was never completed. Bauer's colour system became ever more complex and included up to 1,000 numbers for his Australian work. This method gave an extremely nuanced richness of data points for recording the colouring of plants, fungi, and animals; Bauer's finished illustrations are astonishingly accurate when compared with the living organisms.

Illustrations are particularly important for our knowledge of the appearance of now extinct species. Bauer spent several months in the Norfolk Island group (Australian external territory), whose flora includes many species that only occur there and are now threatened or extinct. His specimens and drawings were the basis for the first flora of Norfolk Island by the botanist Stephan Endlicher (1804–1849). Bauer's collections and field sketches are now housed at the Natural History Museum Vienna. The drawings are in urgent need of digitization for documentation and cross-referencing with other parts of Bauer's work archived elsewhere, so as to become more widely accessible to artists, botanists, and others who rely on these materials.