Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper (12 May 1856 – 9 September 1901) was a German botanist and phytogeographer who made major contributions in the fields of histology, ecology and plant geography.

His father Wilhelm Philippe Schimper (1808-1880) was Director of the Natural History Museum in the same town, Professor of Geology, and a leading bryologist.

In 1883, Schimper postulated the endosymbiotic origin of chloroplasts and paved the way to the symbiogenesis theory of Konstantin Mereschkowski and Lynn Margulis.

[1] In 1886, he was appointed Extraordinary Professor at the University of Bonn, and worked largely on cell histology, chromatophores and starch metabolism.

In 1886, he stayed with Fritz Müller in Brazil, and in 1889–1890 in Ceylon, the Malaya and Botanical Garden in Buitenzorg (Bogor, Java), concentrating on mangroves, epiphytes and littoral vegetation.

At the same time as his Russian soil science colleagues, Schimper discussed the hypothesis of vegetation being limited to climate zones versus those that are azonal, which was later elaborated by Frederic Edward Clements (1916) and geobotanist Heinrich Walter (1954) amongst others.