Alexander Watt

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Alexander Stuart Watt
Born	(1892-06-21)21 June 1892 Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Died	2 March 1985(1985-03-02) (aged 92) Cambridge, England
Alma mater	University of Aberdeen
Known for	cyclic succession in ecology
Awards	Linnean Medal (1975) Fellow of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Ecology
Institutions	University of Cambridge

Alexander Stuart Watt

Watt was born on an Aberdeenshire farm and went to school at Turriff Secondary School and Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. He graduated as MA and BSc (in agricultural science) from the University of Aberdeen in 1913.^[4] He then went to University of Cambridge to work on beech forest under Arthur Tansley and obtained a MS in 1919 (after interruption by military service 1916–1918). From working with Tansley, Watt became part of an academic lineage descended from Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin. Tansley had studied with Francis W. Oliver (1864–1951) at University College, London, who in turn had been mentored by E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929) at University of Cambridge, a student of George Rolleston (1829–1881) at University of Oxford, who had been in turn mentored by Thomas Henry Huxley —"Darwin's bulldog"— in London.^[5]

He was appointed lecturer of forest botany and forest zoology at the University of Aberdeen. He continued his research on southern English beech forest in vacations and obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1924.

In 1929, he became lecturer of forestry at University of Cambridge and, when this undergraduate subject was given up, lecturer of forest botany – "a title which scarcely reflected his wide interest in and influence on plant ecology".^[4] He retired from university in 1959, but continued work – publishing in the Journal of Ecology as late as 1982, 63 years after his first publication in this journal.^[6]

He accepted to be visiting lecturer at the

He was president of the British Ecological Society 1946–1947.

Fellow of the Royal Society since 1957.^[1]

He was awarded the

Scientific impact

Watt's 1947 paper Pattern and process in the plant community in the

Watt published a long series of scientific papers in the New Phytologist under the collective heading "Contributions to the ecology of bracken" (1940–1971). Watt was a posthumous co-author of the substantive account on bracken in the Biological Flora of the British Isles.^[12] Watt wrote a series of preliminary drafts that were extended and updated by his co-author.

Much of Watt's field studies were centred on the Breckland not far from Cambridge. Here, he studied the effect of grazing and dereliction on grassland vegetation.^[13][14]

References