Robert Whittaker
Robert Harding Whittaker ( * December 27, 1920 in Wichita (Kansas / USA ), † 20 October 1980) was an American botanist, climatologist and university professor. Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Whittaker ".
Life
Whittaker studied from 1938 at Washburn Municipal College ( now University ) in Topeka (Kansas ), where he earned a 1942 Bachelor of Arts in Biology and languages. After military service as "Army - Air Force weather observer and forecaster " he studied from 1946 at the University of Illinois, where he and a half years later to the Ph.D. received his doctorate.
Whittaker was a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca and was vice president of the " Ecological Society of America".
Work
Whittaker dealt in about 130 publications in particular with the theoretical foundations and methods of gradient analysis. He also campaigned for the revival of " Individualistic community approach" and the continuum hypothesis by Henry Gleason (1926, 1939) and influenced in this way the vegetation science not only in the Anglo-American countries for decades. He was one of the first ecologists grappled with the advantages and disadvantages of discrete or indiscrete borders in landscape ecology. Whittaker argued for indiscreet limits because smooth transitions come much closer to natural conditions. The global application of numerical, multivariate methods in vegetation science witnessed the breakthrough just before this theoretical background. In combination with modern statistical software packages nowadays they are the basis for many habitat modeling in ecology.
1957 Whittaker has filed the biomes in a temperature - precipitation diagram. The two environmental factors in the first quadrant of an XY coordinate system are applied, which is broken down into different areas, which in turn characterize the different vegetation zones. With the appropriate diagrams, the corresponding vegetation zone can be read at a certain temperature and a certain total precipitation.
Thus one finds, for example, in regions with high temperatures and little rainfall the hot deserts, areas with high temperatures and high precipitation sum the evergreen tropical rain forests and in areas with low temperatures and low rainfall, the arctic and alpine tundra. Whittaker strove to approach the ordination and classification methods and thus the union of the continental European and American Vegetation Science.
Whittaker hit in 1959 in the biological system expansion to five empires before:
Publications
- Whittaker ( 1960): VEGETATION OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS