In scientific ecology, climax community or climatic climax community is a historic term for a community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession in the development of vegetation in an area over time, have reached a steady state. This equilibrium was thought to occur because the climax community is composed of species best adapted to average conditions in that area. The term is sometimes also applied in soil development. Nevertheless, it has been found that a "steady state" is more apparent than real, particularly across long timescales. Notwithstanding, it remains a useful concept.
A quadrat is a frame used in ecology, geography, and biology to isolate a standard unit of area for study of the distribution of an item over a large area. Quadrats are traditionally square, but modern quadrats can be rectangular, circular, or irregular. A quadrat is suitable for sampling or observing plants, slow-moving animals, and some aquatic organisms.
Sir Arthur George Tansley FLS, FRS was an English botanist and a pioneer in the science of ecology.
Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953). The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.
Henry Chandler Cowles was an American botanist and ecological pioneer. A professor at the University of Chicago, he studied ecological succession in the Indiana Dunes of Northwest Indiana. This led to efforts to preserve the Indiana Dunes. One of Cowles' students, O. D. Frank continued his research.
Ecology is a new science and considered as an important branch of biological science, having only become prominent during the second half of the 20th century. Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy, particularly from ethics and politics.
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) is a professional organization of ecological scientists. Based in the United States and founded in 1915, ESA publications include peer-reviewed journals, newsletters, fact sheets, and teaching resources. It holds an annual meeting at different locations in the USA and Canada. In addition to its publications and annual meeting, ESA is engaged in public policy, science, education, and diversity issues.
Frederic Edward Clements was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of plant ecology and vegetation succession.
Phytosociology, also known as phytocoenology or simply plant sociology, is the study of groups of species of plant that are usually found together. Phytosociology aims to empirically describe the vegetative environment of a given territory. A specific community of plants is considered a social unit, the product of definite conditions, present and past, and can exist only when such conditions are met. In phyto-sociology, such a unit is known as a phytocoenosis. A phytocoenosis is more commonly known as a plant community, and consists of the sum of all plants in a given area. It is a subset of a biocoenosis, which consists of all organisms in a given area. More strictly speaking, a phytocoenosis is a set of plants in area that are interacting with each other through competition or other ecological processes. Coenoses are not equivalent to ecosystems, which consist of organisms and the physical environment that they interact with. A phytocoensis has a distribution which can be mapped. Phytosociology has a system for describing and classifying these phytocoenoses in a hierarchy, known as syntaxonomy, and this system has a nomenclature. The science is most advanced in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975) was an American ecologist, botanist, and taxonomist. He was known for his endorsement of the individualistic or open community concept of ecological succession, and his opposition to Frederic Clements's concept of the climax state of an ecosystem. His ideas were largely dismissed during his working life, leading him to move into plant taxonomy, but found favour late in the twentieth century.
John Ernst Weaver was an American botanist, prairie ecologist, and university professor.
Arthur Roy ClaphamCBE, FRS, was a British botanist. Born in Norwich and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Clapham worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station as a crop physiologist (1928–30), and then took a teaching post in the botany department at Oxford University. He was Professor of Botany at Sheffield University 1944–69 and vice chancellor of the university during the 1960s. He coauthored the Flora of the British Isles, which was the first, and for several decades the only, comprehensive flora of the British Isles published in 1952 and followed by new editions in 1962 and 1987. In response to a request from Arthur Tansley, he coined the term ecosystem in the early 1930s.
Victor Ernest Shelford was an American zoologist and animal ecologist who helped to establish ecology as a distinct field of study. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, and helped found the Nature Conservancy in the 1940s. Shelford's early visits and study of Volo Bog in Northern Illinois helped establish its ecological significance. Volo Bog became the first purchase of the Illinois Nature Conservancy.
The International Phytogeographic Excursions was a series of international meetings in plant geography that significantly contributed to exchange of scientific ideas across national and linguistic barriers and also to the rise of Anglo-American plant ecology. The initiative was taken by the British botanist Arthur Tansley at the International Geographic Congress in Geneva in 1908. Tansley and another early key figure, Henry C. Cowles, were both much-inspired by the new 'ecological plant geography' introduced by Eugenius Warming and its quest for answering why-questions about plant distribution, as opposed to the traditional, merely descriptive 'floristic plant geography'.
Alexander Stuart Watt FRS(21 June 1892 – 2 March 1985) was a Scottish botanist and plant ecologist.
Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology that studies the distribution and abundance of plants, the effects of environmental factors upon the abundance of plants, and the interactions among plants and between plants and other organisms. Examples of these are the distribution of temperate deciduous forests in North America, the effects of drought or flooding upon plant survival, and competition among desert plants for water, or effects of herds of grazing animals upon the composition of grasslands.
Thomas Ford Chipp was an English botanist who became Assistant Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He played an important role in development of the study of ecology in the British Empire.
William Gardner Smith was a Scottish botanist and ecologist who pioneered the study and mapping of the vegetation of the United Kingdom. He was a founding member of the British Ecological Society.
Peter Greig-Smith (1922–2003) was a British plant ecologist, founder of the discipline of quantitative ecology in the United Kingdom. He had a deep influence across the world on vegetation studies and plant ecology, mostly from his book Quantitative Plant Ecology, first published in 1957 and a must-read for multiple generations of young ecologists.
Richard Henry Yapp (1871–1929) was an English botanist and an early ecologist, who held the Chair of Botany in Queen's University, Belfast, and the Mason Professorship of Botany at the University of Birmingham.
