van der Valk, Arnold G. (Author)
Arthur G. Tansley never accepted Frederic E. Clements' view that succession is a developmental process whose final stage, the climax formation, is determined primarily by regional climate and that all other types of vegetation are some kind of successional stage or arrested successional stage. Tansley was convinced that in a given region a variety of environmental factors could produce different kinds of climax formations. At the heart of their dispute was Clements' organicist view of succession, i.e., the formation was a complex organism with an ontogeny and phylogeny. As early as 1905, Tansley offered an alternative to Clements' complex organism, the quasi-organism, but Clements in private and public rejected this compromise. Tansley and other plant ecologists continued to criticize Clements' theories for the next 20 years, but with no impact on Clements. John Phillips, a South African plant ecologist who was a follower of Clements, published a series of papers in 1934 and 1935 defending Clementsian ecology. These papers were triggered by the publication of a letter by another ecologist working in Africa who claimed that there was a strong correlation between soils and various kinds of climax vegetation, which was contrary to what was predicted by Phillips and Clements. In 1935, Tansley published an attack on Phillips and Clements and their developmental theory of succession. In it, he proposed the concept of the ecosystem as a way to get around Clements' monoclimax theory by making the physical environment (e.g., soil chemistry, soil texture, soil moisture) as important a factor as climate, plants and other organisms in determining the composition and characteristics of ecological entities, i.e., ecosystems. Tansley's ecosystem concept quickly replaced Clements' monoclimax theory as a dominant paradigm in ecology.
...More
Book
Ayres, Peter G.;
(2012)
Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley
(/isis/citation/CBB001201053/)
Article
Masutti, Christophe;
(2006)
Frederic Clements, Climatology, and Conservation in the 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000700670/)
Article
Antoine C. Dussault;
(2018)
Functional ecology's non-selectionist understanding of function
(/isis/citation/CBB371845560/)
Book
Keller, David R.;
Golley, Frank B.;
(2000)
Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis
(/isis/citation/CBB000101689/)
Book
Pearson, Chris;
(2012)
Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of War and Militarization in Modern France
(/isis/citation/CBB001201432/)
Book
Ayres, P.G.;
(2012)
Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley
(/isis/citation/CBB001421420/)
Article
Ayelet Shavit;
James R. Griesemer;
(2018)
Science and Sentiment: Grinnell’s Fact-Based Philosophy of Biodiversity Conservation
(/isis/citation/CBB589271103/)
Article
Christophe Bonneuil;
(2019)
Seeing nature as a ‘universal store of genes’: How biological diversity became ‘genetic resources’, 1890–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB784934864/)
Article
Reuss, Martin;
Bernhardtb, Emily;
Bunna, Stuart E.;
Hartc, David D.;
Björn Malmqvistd, Timo Muotkae;
Naimanf, Robert J.;
Pringleg, Catherine;
Wilgeni, Brian van;
(2006)
Perspective: The Challenge of Ecologically Sustainable Water Management
(/isis/citation/CBB001180773/)
Article
Palomares, Maria Lourdes D.;
Heymans, Johanna J.;
Pauly, Daniel;
(2007)
Historical Ecology of the Raja Ampat Archipelago, Papua Province, Indonesia
(/isis/citation/CBB000831351/)
Book
Trevor Pearce;
(2020)
Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB241104150/)
Book
Cristina Baldacci;
Shaul Bassi;
Lucio De Capitani;
Pietro Daniel Omodeo;
(2022)
Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide
(/isis/citation/CBB968298285/)
Thesis
Josh England;
(2021)
Olives in the Mountains: A Case Study of the Roman City of Sagalassos
(/isis/citation/CBB215221359/)
Book
Carl Death;
(2016)
The Green State in Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB850595474/)
Article
Céline Granjou;
Isabelle Arpin;
(November 2015)
Epistemic Commitments: Making Relevant Science in Biodiversity Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB182986827/)
Article
Kohler, Robert E.;
(2008)
Plants and Pigeonholes: Classification as a Practice in American Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB000950399/)
Article
Eliot, Christopher;
(2007)
Method and Metaphysics in Clements's and Gleason's Ecological Explanations
(/isis/citation/CBB000770758/)
Article
da Silva Nunes, Patricia;
Cavassan, Osmar;
da Rocha Brando, Fernanda;
(2013)
Frederic Edward Clements e o conceito de sucessão ecológica
(/isis/citation/CBB001214031/)
Article
Bocking, Stephen;
(2012)
Science, Salmon, and Sea Lice: Constructing Practice and Place in an Environmental Controversy
(/isis/citation/CBB001320034/)
Chapter
Kenneth W. Noe;
(2015)
Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History
(/isis/citation/CBB769919988/)
Be the first to comment!