Karl Joseph Niklas (born 1948) is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor emeritus in the Section of Plant Biology, School of Integrative Plant Science, at Cornell University. [1] He is best known for his work on plant biomechanics, allometry, and functional morphology, and for his long-standing contributions to understanding plant evolutionary biology, particularly early land plant evolutionary diversification patterns and morphospaces. [2]
Niklas completed his undergraduate studies at the City College of New York. He earned his Ph.D. in paleobiology from the University of Illinois in 1974. He carried out his post-doctoral work at Birkbeck College in London as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow. [2]
Niklas was curator for the New York Botanical Garden. He joined the faculty at Cornell in 1978. In 1985 he was named full professor and appointed as a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in 2000. He is the author of over 480 peer-reviewed scientific papers and five major books, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Niklas has received numerous awards, including awards for teaching (e.g., he received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for teaching in 1995). He is a member of the Botanical Society of America and served as its President (2008 – 2009) and Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Botany (1995 – 2004). [2] Niklas was the first botanist to tabulate the temporal distributions of plant species in the fossil record to quantify land plant diversification patterns throughout the Phanerozoic, and he was among the first to use factor analysis to identify major floristic changes and turnover patterns in the fossil record. Niklas is also the only person to construct a computer generated morphospace for early land plants to quantify how each simulated plant intercepts sunlight, copes with mechanical forces, conducts fluids, and sheds reproductive propagules. Using a search algorithm, he was able to simulate patterns of morphological change that mimicked in all respects patterns observed in the fossil record. Another facet of his work was the use of fluid mechanics to understand how wind pollinated plants trap airborne pollen grains. Niklas’ more recent work has continued to focus on using physics, chemistry, and mathematics to quantify how physical factors dictate the spatial and temporal distributions of extant plants. His books on biomechanics and plant allometry have stimulated a renaissance in the use of engineering and scaling principles to understand diverse phenomena, ranging from the relationship between plant growth rates and body mass and the effects of wind on the mechanical stability of trees to the distributions of above- and below-ground biomass in forested communities. Niklas is also a celebrated and dedicated teacher and mentor.
Biology – The natural science that studies life. Areas of focus include structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants. Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals. Mycogeography is the branch that studies distribution of fungi, such as mushrooms.
Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch of biophysics.
Paleoecology is the study of interactions between organisms and/or interactions between organisms and their environments across geologic timescales. As a discipline, paleoecology interacts with, depends on and informs a variety of fields including paleontology, ecology, climatology and biology.
Brian Carey Goodwin was a Canadian mathematician and biologist, a Professor Emeritus at the Open University and a founder of theoretical biology and biomathematics. He introduced the use of complex systems and generative models in developmental biology. He suggested that a reductionist view of nature fails to explain complex features, controversially proposing the structuralist theory that morphogenetic fields might substitute for natural selection in driving evolution. He was also a visible member of the Third Culture movement.
Leigh Van Valen was a U.S. evolutionary biologist. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.
George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
Allometry is the study of the relationship of body size to shape, anatomy, physiology and behaviour, first outlined by Otto Snell in 1892, by D'Arcy Thompson in 1917 in On Growth and Form and by Julian Huxley in 1932.
Edgar Shannon Anderson was an American botanist. He introduced the term introgressive hybridization and his 1949 book of that title was an original and important contribution to botanical genetics. His work on the transfer and origin of adaptations through natural hybridization continues to be relevant.
In biology, saltation is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation. This was historically offered as an alternative to Darwinism. Some forms of mutationism were effectively saltationist, implying large discontinuous jumps.
Paleobiology is an interdisciplinary field that combines the methods and findings found in both the earth sciences and the life sciences. Paleobiology is not to be confused with geobiology, which focuses more on the interactions between the biosphere and the physical Earth.
Randall James Bayer is an American systematic botanist born in Buffalo, New York, who spent his childhood in East Aurora. He earned a B.Sc. with major in plant breeding and minor in horticulture in 1978 from Cornell University; an M.Sc. in systematic botany in 1980 from the Ohio State University; and a Ph.D. in 1984 from the Ohio State University with the dissertation Evolutionary Investigations in Antennaria. His interest in the genus Antennaria was inspired by noted evolutionary botanist George Ledyard Stebbins (1906–2000) who was a visiting professor at the Ohio State University in 1978–1979.
Léon Camille Marius Croizat was a French-Italian scholar and botanist who developed an orthogenetic synthesis of the evolution of biological form over space, in time, which he called panbiogeography.
Áskell Löve was an Icelandic systematic botanist, particularly active in the Arctic.
Leslie David Gottlieb (1936–2012) was a United States biologist described by the Botanical Society of America as "one of the most influential plant evolutionary biologists over the past several decades". He was employed at the University of California, Davis for 34 years, and published widely. In addition to his primary work in plant genetics, Gottlieb was an advocate for rare and endangered plant conservation.
Pamela Soltis is an American botanist. She is a distinguished professor at the University of Florida, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, principal investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics and Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and founding director of the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute.
The rate of evolution is quantified as the speed of genetic or morphological change in a lineage over a period of time. The speed at which a molecular entity evolves is of considerable interest in evolutionary biology since determining the evolutionary rate is the first step in characterizing its evolution. Calculating rates of evolutionary change is also useful when studying phenotypic changes in phylogenetic comparative biology. In either case, it can be beneficial to consider and compare both genomic data and paleontological data, especially in regards to estimating the timing of divergence events and establishing geological time scales.
Harlan Parker Banks was an American paleobotanist and Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor Emeritus in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, known for his studies of Devonian plants. A Fulbright Research Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and president of the Botanical Society of America.
Douglas Soltis is a Distinguished Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics, Florida Museum of Natural History, and Department of Biology at the University of Florida. His research interests are in plant evolution and phylogeny, an area in which he has published extensively together with his wife Pamela Soltis and together they were the joint awardees of the 2006 Asa Gray Award. They are the principal investigators in the Soltis laboratory, where they both hold the rank of Distinguished Professor and are contributing authors of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.
The sloshing bucket model of evolution is a theory in evolutionary biology that describes how environmental disturbances varying in magnitude will affect the species present. The theory emphasizes the causal relationship between environmental factors that impinge and affect genealogical systems, providing an overarching view that determines the relationship between the variety of biological systems.