His fieldwork focused on South America, and his Allgemeine Länderkunde was a standard work on world geography for several decades.

He was educated at Jena, Göttingen, and Leipzig, and became a Privatdozent at Würzburg in 1887 after extensive travels in Venezuela and Colombia.

[1] In his education, he broke with his mercantile family's tradition to study the emerging academic field of geography.

In 1902, from the cathedra of Geography of the University of Giessen, he publicly opposed the naval blockade that Germany, England and Italy imposed on Venezuela to force the collection of the foreign debt.

Wilhelm Sievers published the Allgemeine Länderkunde (several editions 1891-1935), which for several decades was the leading international geographical publication covering all continents.