He was Professor of Botany at the University of Lund and later Bishop of Karlstad Diocese (Papenfuss, 1976).[14] Many species still show his name as the authority of the scientific name. He traveled widely in Europe visiting Germany, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy and was the first to emphasize the importance of the reproductive characters of algae and use them to distinguish the different genera and families. His son, Jacob Georg Agardh (1813–1901), who became Professor of Botany at Lund in 1839, made a study of the life-histories of algae, described many new genera and species.