Ecology

In Great Britain, plant ecology was initiated by botanical surveys done by members of hundreds of local natural history societies. Arthur S. Tansley, a pioneer British plant ecologist, suggested formation of the British Vegetation Committee, which brought the scientific leadership of the natural history societies together to study British vegetation.

Continental ecology was stimulated by the experience of European biologists in tropical colonies. Several of these, notably Drude, Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper, and Warming produced significant works of plant ecology that influenced British and American ecology.

Ecology in America was much influenced by early state-run natural history agencies, notably in the Midwest. Stephen A. Forbes was director of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History for many years, influencing numerous ecologists employed there as well as producing many of the most insightful ecological articles published before 1900. Edward A. Birge was director of the natural history division of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey and a pioneer in ecological studies of lakes. Bessey organized the Botanical Survey of Nebraska, which produced the major theorist of American plant ecology, Frederic E. Clements (1874–1945). American ecologists were influenced by federal surveys of the trans-Mississippi West. Ronald Tobey traced the development of plant ecology in the Midwestern grasslands, influenced by the developments of prairie agriculture and the Clements school of ecology.

Formal ecological societies were established in Britain in 1913 and in the United States in 1915. Academic ecology developed notably in Midwestern universities. In its century as a recognizable science, ecology acquired new and expanded significance. This is evident in the proliferation of journals of ecology. English language journals numbered four in 1940, increasing to twelve by 1980. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) included 102 journals under ecology in 2000, fifty of which had a clear reference to ecology in the title. The journal Ecology went from quarterly to monthly and the number of pages per year increased from approximately 750 in 1940 to about 2,250 in 2000. This proliferation of journals is a mixed blessing, making keeping up with the literature well nigh impossible at a time that ecologists are becoming involved in increasingly diverse enterprises.