Professor Hedberg was a pioneer in scientific knowledge on the afroalpine vegetation. Our present knowledge of this biosystem owes much to the research he and his wife Inga did on the Rwenzori and other high mountains in East Africa. His breakthrough views were based on their systematic fieldwork in the late 1940s. 'Features of Afroalpine Plant Ecology' remains a landmark in equatorial alpine ecological research up till today, and is still available in a facsimile re-edition of 1995.[5]
In 1981, he was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was recognised as a doctor jubilaris at the Linnean Doctoral Promotion at Uppsala University 2007. He was updating the Umbelliferae manuscript (prepared by Vernon Heywood, Stephen Jury and others) when he died in 2007.[6]
^"Record of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London for the Session of 1977-78". Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 10 (4): 433–461. December 1978. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.1978.tb00024.x.