Famous Ecologists - General Ecology PCB4043C Leibold

John Graunt

- Calculated doubling time
- Based on Adam and Eve date of birth originally, corrected from 2^93 years to about 64 years.

Thomas Malthus

- Human population grows exponentially, food production grows linearly
- Food Production cannot keep up

Ester Boserup

- Critic of Mathusian theory
- Suggested that development of food production technology and techniques would allow it to keep up with population growth

Charles Linnaeus

- Developed Taxonomy
- First divided species into different clades based on common features

Alexander von Humboldt

- Vegetation and Geography
- "Grandfather of Ecology"

Charles Darwin

- Studied natural selection in finches, suggested it applied to everything

Sir Ronald Ross

- Studied relationships between infection in humans and infection in mosquitos compared to malaria infection rates
- Focus on Anopheles Mosquitoes
- Found more infected mosquitos can lead to increase in malaria infections, while few infected mosquitoes results in less success in malaria transmission and infection.
- SIR Model is a modernized version of his work
- Won Nobel Prize in 1902, wanted to become a writer, father forced him to study medicine.

Charles Elton (1927)

- Refined Grinnell's (1925) statement about niches
- Studied Food Webs, Trophic Pyramids, and the effects on Body Size and Scaling on species.
- "Father of Ecology"
- Defined "Niche" as "The role of a species in its ecosystem community"
- Suggested each species has a "consumption role" (what it eats) and a "resource role" (what eats it) in a food web

Joseph Grinnell (1925)

- "Described conditions that allowed a species to maintain itself in an environment"
- "It is, of course, axiomatic that no two species regularly established in a single fauna have precisely the same niche relationships" <- mentioned niches at very end of his paper, idea expanded upon later by Elton in 1927

G. E. Hutchinson

- "n" variables contribute to each niche, many factors involved in determining where a species "fits" in an environment

Robert MacArthur (1968)
David Tillman (1980)

- "Relationships go both ways"
- Can be complex with "n" dimensions/factors
- Can be context dependent (different relationships are present in different situations)

Verhulst

- Suggested 'logistic growth' curve to represent population growth