Frederic Clements

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Frederic Edward Clements
Born(1874-09-16)September 16, 1874
Carnegie Institution of Science

Frederic Edward Clements (September 16, 1874 – July 26, 1945) was an American

plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of plant ecology[2] and vegetation succession.[3]
: 51 

Biography

Born in

Charles Bessey, who inspired Clements to research topics such as microscopy, plant physiology, and laboratory experimentation.[4] He was also classmate of Willa Cather and Roscoe Pound. While at the University of Nebraska, he met Edith Gertrude Schwartz (1874–1971), also a botanist and ecologist, and they were married in 1899.[1][5]

In 1905 he was appointed full professor at the University of Nebraska, but left in 1907 to head the botany department at the

Carnegie Institution of Washington, Clements faced criticism for his experiments conducted with the purpose of creating new plant species. Due to these criticisms and as well as personal conflicts with his co workers, in the 1920s the title of director of research in experimental taxonomy was given to Harvey Monroe Hall.[4]

During winter he worked at

U.S. Soil Conservation Service. In addition to his field investigations, he carried out experimental work in the laboratory and greenhouse, both at the Pikes Peak station and at Santa Barbara.[1][7]

Theory of vegetation change to climax community

From his observations of the vegetation of Nebraska and the western United States, Clements developed one of the most influential theories of vegetation development. Vegetation composition does not represent a permanent condition but gradually changes with time. Clements suggested that the development of vegetation can be understood as a unidirectional sequence of stages resembling the development of an individual organism. After a complete or partial disturbance, vegetation grows back (under ideal conditions) towards a stable "climax state", which describes the vegetation best suited to the local conditions. Though any actual instance of vegetation might follow the ideal sequence towards stability, it can be interpreted in relation to that sequence, as a deviation from it due to non-ideal conditions.

In these studies, he and Roscoe Pound (who subsequently moved from ecology to legal scholarship) developed the widely-used method of sampling using quadrats around 1898.[8][9][10]

Clements's

Henry Gleason and Arthur Tansley early on, and by Robert Whittaker mid-century, and largely fell out of favor.[11][2]

Community-unit view of vegetation types or plant communities

In his 1916 publication, Plant Succession, and his 1920 Plant Indicators, Clements metaphorically equated units of vegetation, (now called

plant communities) with individual organisms.[12] He observed that some groups of species, which he called "formations", were repeatedly associated together.[12] He is frequently said to have believed that some species were dependent on the group, and the group on that species in an obligatory relationship.[12] However, this interpretation has been challenged by the argument that Clements did not assume mutual dependence as an organizing principle of formations or plant communities.[13]
Clements observed little overlap in kinds of species from type to type, with many species confined to just a single type.
Henry Gleason, who viewed vegetation as a continuum, not a unit, with associations being merely coincidental, and that any support by observations or data of clusters of species as predicted by Clements's view was either an artifact of the observer's perception or a result of defective data analysis.[12][14]

Lamarckism

Clements was an advocate of neo-Lamarckian evolution. Ecologist Arthur Tansley wrote that because of his support for Lamarckism, Clements "never seemed to give proper weight to the results of modern genetical research."[15]

Science historian Ronald C. Tobey has commented that:

[Clements] believed that plants and animals could acquire a wide variety and range of characteristics in their struggle to survive and adapt to their environment, and that these features were heritable. In the 1920s, he conducted experiments to transform plant species native to one ecological zone into a species adapted to another, higher, zone. Clements was quite convinced of the validity of his experiments, but this experimental Lamarckism fell to experimental disproof in the 1930s.[16]

Clements spent much time trying to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired traits in plants. By the late 1930s scientists had provided Darwinian explanations for the results of his transplant experiments.[17]

Honors

In 1903, the flower

stonecrop, was named in honor of Frederic Clements.[18]

Writings

Among his works are:


See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Frederic E. Clements". University of California at Santa Barbara. Archived from the original on October 1, 2012. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  2. ^ . Clements was important also for publishing the first American textbook in ecology, Research Methods in Ecology (1905), which discussed the statistical and graphical analytical methods he and other Nebraskan ecologists developed from 1897 to 1905. His ecological theory rested on two ideas, the concept of ecological succession of plant formations, and the treatment of the plant community as a "complex organism" undergoing a life cycle and evolutionary history analogous to the individual organism. The formal presentation of his theory appeared in 1916 in his monumental study Plant Succession.
  3. .
  4. ^
    Britannica
    . Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  5. .
  6. ^ ["https://sandhillsarchive.unl.edu/project/frederic-clements/" "https://sandhillsarchive.unl.edu/project/frederic-clements/"]. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
  7. ^ "History of Forest Service Research in the Central and Southern Rocky Mountain Regions, 1908-1975" (PDF). p. 17.
  8. ^ Pound, R.; Clements, F. E. (June 1898). "A method of determining the abundance of secondary species". Minnesota Botanical Studies. 2: 19–24.
  9. ^ Pound, R.; Clements, F. E. (1900). Phytogeography of Nebraska (Second ed.). Lincoln, Neb. Published by the Seminar. pp. 61–63.
  10. S2CID 14481669
    .
  11. ISSN 0926-7220.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bibcode (link
    )
  12. ^ .
  13. .
  14. .
  15. ^ Tansley, A. G. (1947). Obituary Notice: Frederic Edward Clements, 1874–1945. Journal of Ecology 34 (1): 194–196.
  16. ^ Hagen, Joel B. (1993). Clementsian Ecologists: The Internal Dynamics of a Research School. Osiris. Vol. 8, Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals. pp. 178–195.
  17. ^ Britton, N L; Rose, J N (1903). "Botanical contributions: New or noteworthy North American Crassulaceae". Bulletin of the New York Botanical Garden. 3: 3.
  18. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Clem.

External links