His grandfather Joachim Dietrich Brandis was personal physician to Queen Marie of Denmark and Norway and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

[1] His first wife died in India in 1862, and during a two-year sabbatical in Europe from 1865 to 1867, he met and married Katharina Hasse, eighteen years his junior.

In 1850, the British Association in Edinburgh formed a committee to study forest destruction at the behest of Hugh Cleghorn.

This was based on reports submitted by John McClelland, then Superintendent of Forests in Burma, at the time part of the British India.

Brandis joined the British civil service in 1856 as superintendent of the teak forests of Pegu division in eastern Burma.

He introduced the "taungya" system,[4] in which Karen villagers provided labour for clearing, planting and weeding teak plantations.

After his retirement from the position as Inspector General of Forests in India in 1883, he returned to Bonn, but frequently visited England in the following years.

He also supervised training of forestry students at the Royal Indian Engineering College in England for eight years (1888–1896).

Schenck of Germany (while a visiting professor at the University of Giessen), and Gifford Pinchot and Henry Graves (the first and second chiefs of the USDA Forest Service) of the United States.

[citation needed] He influenced the forestry movement in the United States by mentoring Pinchot, Graves, and others who came to study with him in Germany, and through his voluminous correspondence with many other men, such as Charles Sprague Sargent and Franklin Hough involved in establishing the U.S. national forest system.

His influence was so great that President Roosevelt sent him a photograph in 1896 with the inscription "To Sir Dietrich Brandis, in high appreciation of his services to forestry in the United States.