Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten

Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten (6 November 1817, in Stralsund – 10 July 1908, in Zoppot) was a German botanist and geologist.

Born in Stralsund, he followed the example of Alexander von Humboldt and traveled 1844-56 the northern part of South America (Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia).

From 1856 to 1868, he was a professor at the agricultural college in Berlin, afterwards serving as a professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna (1868–72).

[1] In 1881, at the suggestion of David Friedrich Weinland, Karsten became convinced of the correctness of Otto Hahn's organic theory of the chondrites and, as a result, wrote an essay entitled "Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen"[2] in which he declared his support for Hahn's theory.

As a taxonomist, he was the binomial author of many botanical species.