Background/Question/Methods In 1898-99, Henry Chandler Cowles (1869-1939) published the first systematic description of plant succession. Working in the harsh, unstable environment of the Lake Michigan sand dunes, he showed how plant communities came into the dunes landscape, flourished there, and created conditions for their replacement by successor plant communities, leading over many generations to a stable climax community. In 1900, Cowles expanded his plant succession studies into other Chicago-area ecosystems. Starting from a blank sheet of paper, Cowles created the ecology curriculum at the University of Chicago and taught it for more than thirty years. He became a highly successful field teacher who decisively influenced the first generation of U.S. ecologists whose careers ended in the 1970s. He helped to found the Ecological Society of America and was an early conservationist, working to protect the Indiana Dunes and establish state parks in Illinois and elsewhere. Cowles has received little credit for his work. Most of his papers were destroyed long ago and, until recently, there was no biography or bibliography. The author did 3.5 years of library research, consulted hitherto-unknown primary materials, and tracked down unpublished memoirs to produce
Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, which appeared in 2007.
Results/Conclusions
Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, the first book ever on Cowles, tells the story of his life, reprints the best of his writings, and contains a descriptive bibliography along with eight pages of family and expedition photographs.
The author concludes that Cowles was a child of the 19th century, who used the methods of Darwin. He acutely observed the natural world, thought through what he had seen in highly disciplined fashion, and stated his conclusions, which were largely sound. He started his main work in 1898, just as Frederic Clement introduced today’s statistical field research techniques. Cowles applauded Clement, taught his methods to students, but never came to terms with them in his own work. Instead he published little and devoted himself to his students, giving them the results of his extensive informal research, which they followed up using modern methodology and took credit for.
