Dr. Karl Peter Buttler (1942-2018) was a botanist, ecologist, systematist and expert in orchids. He was a member of ASPT from 1976 until his death. Colleagues at the Wetterau Society described Karl a very sympathetic, calm and active person.

Dr. Buttler studied biology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main , from 1961 to 1963 and then at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. In 1967 he received his doctorate in Munich in the working group of Hermann Merxmüller with a dissertation on "Cytotaxonomic studies on Central and southern European Draba species". He was then employed as a scientific assistant at the Institute for Systematic Botany at the University of Munich. In later years he worked as a freelance Botanist and non-fiction author in Frankfurt am Main and Offenbach am Main.

Dr. Buttler collected numerous plants for various herbaria; 32,000 of which are at the Herbarium Senckenbergianum Frankfurt/M. (FR). He was the lead author of the updated "List of Vascular Plants in Germany", which was published in December 2018 in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN). Karl also helped co-author the third and fourth versions of the IUCN Red List of Ferns and Seed Plants in Hesse in 1997 and 2008.

A funeral for Dr. Karl Peter Buttler was held on 11 Jan 2019 and he was buried in the Frankfurt-Bornheim cemetery.