Henry A. Gleason

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Henry A. Gleason
Author abbrev. (botany)Gleason

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.

Life and work

Gleason was born in

University of Illinois earned a PhD from Columbia University in Biology in 1906. He held faculty positions at the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, before returning to the East Coast, to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, New York
, where he remained for the rest of his career, until 1950.

In Gleason's early

pioneer
species, and dominant species.

However, in 1918, Gleason began to express significant doubts on the usefulness of some of Clements's widely employed vocabulary, especially the use of the organism metaphor to describe the growth of vegetation, and the treatment of the units of vegetation as including climaxes. (What units should be used in the analysis of vegetation was a widely disputed issue in early twentieth-century ecology.) In 1926, Gleason expressed even stronger objections to Clements's theory. First, he argued that Clements's identification of particular kinds of vegetation assumed too much homogeneity, since areas of vegetation are actually similar to one another only to degrees. Second, he argued that Clements's associating particular vegetation types with particular areas underestimated the real diversity of vegetation. These objections together cast doubt, for Gleason, on the "integrity of the association concept" itself—on identifying any grouping of species as amounting to a nameable association, like "oak-maple association," as botanists and ecologists (including Gleason himself) normally had.

As an alternative to describing vegetation in terms of associations, Gleason offered "the Individualistic concept of ecology," in which "the phenomena of vegetation depend completely upon the phenomena of the individual" species (1917), and plant associations are less structured than he thought Clements's theory maintained. At times, Gleason suggested that the distribution of plants approaches mathematical randomness.

Clements never responded in print to Gleason's objections and alternative models, and they were largely ignored until the 1950s, when research by a number of ecologists (particularly

John T. Curtis
) supported Gleasonian models. Subsequently, 'species-individualistic' models have become prevalent in community ecology.

Frustration due to dismissal of his ecological ideas without serious consideration may have contributed to Gleason's general abandonment of ecology. From the 1930s onward, he shifted the focus of his work to plant taxonomy, where he became an influential figure, working for many years at the New York Botanical Garden, and authoring with Arthur Cronquist one of the authoritative floras of northeastern North America.

Gleason married Eleanor Theodolinda Mattei, the daughter of the Swiss-American winemaker

Andrew Gleason, (1921–2008), was a mathematician and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University
.

Awards and honors

Bibliography

Works by Gleason

The standard author abbreviation Gleason is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[5]

  • Gleason, Henry A. 1901. The flora of the prairies. B. S. Thesis.
    University of Illinois
    .
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1907. A botanical survey of the Illinois River Valley sand region. Ill. State Lab. Nat. Hist., Bull. 7:149-194.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1907. On the biology of the sand areas of Illinois. II. A botanical survey of the Illinois River Valley sand region. Ill. Lab. Nat. Hist., Bull. 7:149-194.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1908. A virgin prairie in Illinois. Ill. Acad. Sci., Trans. 1:62.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1909. The vegetational history of a river dune. Ill. Acad. Sci., Trans. 2:19-26.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1909. Some Unsolved Problems of the Prairies.
    Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club
    36(5): 265–271.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1910. The vegetation of the inland sand deposits of Illinois. Ill. Lab. Nat. Hist., Bull. 9:23-174.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1912. An Isolated Prairie Grove and Its Phytogeographical Significance.
    Botanical Gazette
    53(1): 38–49.
  • Gleason, Henry A. and Frank C. Gates. 1912. A Comparison of the Rates of Evaporation in Certain Associations in Central Illinois. Botanical Gazette 53(6): 478–491.
  • Henry Gleason (October 1917). "The Structure and Development of the Plant Association". Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. 44 (10): 463–481.
    Wikidata Q112770028
    .
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1922. On the Relation between Species and Area. Ecology 3(2): 158–162.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1922. The Vegetational History of the Middle West.
    Annals of the Association of American Geographers
    12: 39–85.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1925. Species and Area. Ecology 6(1): 66–74.
  • Gleason, Henry A. (1926), "The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association", Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 53 (1): 7–26,
    JSTOR 2479933
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1927. Further Views on the Succession-Concept. Ecology 8(3): 299–326.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1936. Is Sunusia an Association? Ecology 17(3): 444–451.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1939. The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association. American Midland Naturalist 21(1): 92–110.
  • Gleason, Henry A. 1975. Delving into the History of American Ecology.
    Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
    56(4): 7–10.

Works on Gleason

References

  1. ^ "Henry A. Gleason Papers (PP)". www.nybg.org.
  2. ^ Gleason, Jean Berko (November 2009), "A life well lived" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 56 (10): 1266–1267.
  3. ^ "ATBC Honorary Fellows". Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
  4. ^ "Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve Area". Illinois DNR. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
  5. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Gleason.

External links