Gavril Tanfilyev

Gavril Ivanovich Tanfilyev (Russian: Гавриил Иванович Танфильев 6 March 1857 – 14 September 1928) was a Russian and Soviet soil scientist and botanist who worked on biogeography and aspects of plants ecology associated with soil and climate and examined the distributional limits of plants.

Tanfilyev was born in Tallinn where his father was a Baltic shipping customs officer.

He studied the soil and vegetation in the tundra and steppe region and produced a major work on plant geography in 1916.

He proposed the theory that the advance of the forest was geologically recent and that the steppe spread much further north in the past.

[1][2] Tanfilyev received a Pyotr Semyonov gold medal from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1908.