Frederic Clements
Frederic Edward Clements | |
---|---|
Born | Carnegie Institution of Science | September 16, 1874
Frederic Edward Clements (September 16, 1874 – July 26, 1945) was an American
: 51Biography
Born in
In 1905 he was appointed full professor at the University of Nebraska, but left in 1907 to head the botany department at the
During winter he worked at
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
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
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
Writings
Among his works are:
- The Phytogeography of Nebraska (1898; second edition, 1900)
- Research Methods in Ecology (1905)
- Plant Physiology and Ecology (1907)
- Plant Succession. An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation (1916)
- Plant Indicators. The Relation of Plant Communities to Process and Practice (1920)
- The Phylogenetic Method in Taxonomy: The North American Species of Artemisia, Chrysothamnus, and Atriplex (1923, with Harvey Monroe Hall)
- Plant Succession and Indicators. A definitive edition of Plant succession and Plant indicators (1928, reprinted 1973)
- Flower Families and Ancestors (1928, with Edith Clements)
- Plant Competition. An Analysis of Community Functions (1929, with J.E. Weaver & H.C. Hanson. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington
- The Genera of Fungi (1931, repr. 1965, with C. L. Shear)
- Nature and structure of the climax (1936). The Journal of Ecology, 24(1), 252–284.
See also
References
- ^ 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.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-18210-0.
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.
- LCCN 61-18435.
- ^ Britannica. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
- ISBN 9780028429304.
- ^ ["https://sandhillsarchive.unl.edu/project/frederic-clements/" "https://sandhillsarchive.unl.edu/project/frederic-clements/"].
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(help) - ^ "History of Forest Service Research in the Central and Southern Rocky Mountain Regions, 1908-1975" (PDF). p. 17.
- ^ Pound, R.; Clements, F. E. (June 1898). "A method of determining the abundance of secondary species". Minnesota Botanical Studies. 2: 19–24.
- ^ Pound, R.; Clements, F. E. (1900). Phytogeography of Nebraska (Second ed.). Lincoln, Neb. Published by the Seminar. pp. 61–63.
- S2CID 14481669.
- ISSN 0926-7220.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: bibcode (link - ^ ISBN 9780943460260.
- S2CID 256398149.
- ISBN 9780520043527.
- ^ Tansley, A. G. (1947). Obituary Notice: Frederic Edward Clements, 1874–1945. Journal of Ecology 34 (1): 194–196.
- ISBN 0-520-04352-9
- ^ Hagen, Joel B. (1993). Clementsian Ecologists: The Internal Dynamics of a Research School. Osiris. Vol. 8, Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals. pp. 178–195.
- ^ Britton, N L; Rose, J N (1903). "Botanical contributions: New or noteworthy North American Crassulaceae". Bulletin of the New York Botanical Garden. 3: 3.
- ^ International Plant Names Index. Clem.