Ludwig Greiner

Ludwig Greiner (1796-1882) was a 19th-century forest and lumber industry management expert who improved the effectiveness of woodland valuation methods in the Austrian Empire and trained a whole new generation of foresters in a comprehensive approach to the management of natural resources. While his goals were defined by a need to run a profitable business, he introduced procedures that replaced previous exploitative, earth-eroding lumbering on Saxe-Coburg's estates with practices that contained aspects of modern ecology. Greiner's insistence on a thorough woodland inventory of his employer's vast, poorly charted lands gave him his enduring recognition outside the field defined by his expertise. His passion for precision, geomatics, and the outdoors made him the first person to disprove the results of previous measurements and accurately identify Gerlachovský štít as the highest peak in the whole 1,500 km (900 mi.) long Carpathian mountain range.