Charles Elton: Pioneer conservation biologist

Environment and History

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 183-202

  Simberloff, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE   (United States)

Author keywords

Aldo Leopold; Arthur Tansley; Charles Elton; Conservation; Ecology; Introduced

Indexed keywords

BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT; BIOLOGICAL INVASION; CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT; CONSERVATION PLANNING; ECOLOGICAL APPROACH; ECOLOGICAL STABILITY; ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY; FOOD WEB; POPULATION CYCLE; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 84864021117     PISSN: 09673407     EISSN: 17527023     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3197/096734012X13303670112731     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London: Methuen, 1958), p.145.
2. Amyan Macfadyen, 'Obituary. Charles Sutherland Elton,' Journal of Animal Ecology 61 (1992): 499-502.
3. Anthony Ricciardi and Hugh J. MacIsaac, 'The book that began invasion biology,' Nature 452 (2008): 34.
4. David. M. Richardson and Petr Pyšek, 'Fifty years of invasion ecology-the legacy of Charles Elton,' Diversity and Distributions 14 (2008): 161-168.
5. Paul Colinvaux, Introduction to Ecology (New York: Wiley, 1973), p. 131.
6. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 297-298.
7. Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 88-92.
8. Mathew A. Leibold and J. Timothy Wootton, 'Introduction,' Animal Ecology (reprint of Charles Elton, Animal Ecology) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. xxxii.
9. Matthew K. Chew, 'Ending with Elton: Preludes to Invasion Biology' (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2006), p. 92.
10. Peter Turchin, Complex Population Dynamics: a Theoretical/Empirical Synthesis (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).
11. Chew 2006, p. 97.
12. David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
13. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14. Julianne Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey (Washington: Island Press, 2006); several essays in Lisa H. Sideris and Kathleen Dean Moore (eds.) Rachel Carson. Legacy and Challenge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
15. rd edition (Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer, 2006).
16. Richard Southwood and John R. Clarke, 'Charles Sutherland Elton,' Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 45 (1999): 129-140.
17. Charles S. Elton, 'Salmon and trout conservation,' Journal of Animal Ecology 1 (1932): 210-212.
18. Charles S. Elton, 'Salmon and trout conservation,' Journal of Animal Ecology 1 (1932): 212.
19. Charles S. Elton, Exploring the Animal World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933).
20. Elton defined ecology as 'scientific natural history'-Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), p. 40.
21. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology, p. 166.
22. Worster, Nature's Economy, p. 203.
23. Elton, Exploring the Animal World, p. 82.
24. Charles S. Elton, 'Three hundred years of conservation,' Journal of Animal Ecology 7 (1938): 402-403.
25. Charles S. Elton, 'Three hundred years of conservation,' Journal of Animal Ecology 7 (1938): 402-403.
26. Charles S. Elton, 'Three hundred years of conservation,' Journal of Animal Ecology 7 (1938): 402.
27. 'The three dominant factors which have caused changes in the park are the hunting motive, giving place to a wider conservation; the amount of public access; and the inter-relations of animal life to the vegetation.' Journal of Animal Ecology. 402-403.
28. Charles S. Elton, 'The relation of man to animals,' Journal of Animal Ecology 8 (1939): 390-391.
29. Charles S. Elton, 'The relation of man to animals,' Journal of Animal Ecology 8 (1939): 390-391.
30. Charles S. Elton, 'The relation of man to animals,' Journal of Animal Ecology 8 (1939): 390.
31. Charles S. Elton, 'Alien invaders. An animal census in Britain.' Letter to The Times (London), 6 May 1933: 13-14.
32. Charles S. Elton, 'Alien invaders. An animal census in Britain.' Letter to The Times (London), 6 May 1933: 13-14.
33. Charles S. Elton, 'The state of the British fauna,' Journal of Animal Ecology 12 (1943): 216-217.
34. Charles S. Elton, 'The state of the British fauna,' Journal of Animal Ecology 12 (1943): 216.
35. Charles S. Elton, 'The state of the British fauna,' Journal of Animal Ecology 12 (1943): 217.
36. Charles S. Elton, 'The state of the British fauna,' Journal of Animal Ecology 12 (1943): 216.
37. Peter Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists. A History of the Bureau of Animal Population (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
38. Chew 2006, p. 175.
39. Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists, p. 28.
40. Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 253-256, Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin (http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711. dl/AldoLeopold) (hereafter ALA).
41. ALA, Correspondence: A-K, 463-467.
42. Charles S. Elton, 'The biological cost of modern transport,' Journal of Animal Ecology 13 (1944): 87-88.
43. Gregg Howald, C. Josh Donlan, Juan Pablo Galván, James C. Russell, John Parkes, Araceli Samaniego, Yiwei Want, Dick Veitch, Piero Genovesi, Michel Pascal, Alan Saunders and Bernie Tershy, 'Invasive rodent eradication on islands,' Conservation Biology 21 (2007): 1258-1268.
44. st century,' in Invasive Species Management, ed. by Mick N. Clout and Peter A. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 47-60.
45. Tom Warwick, 'The distribution of the muskrat (Fiber zibethicus) in the British Isles,' Journal of Animal Ecology 3 (1934): 250-267.
46. Tom Warwick, 'A contribution to the ecology of the musk-rat (Ondatra zibethica) in the British Isles,' Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London A 110 (1940): 165-201.
47. John Sheail, 'The extermination of the muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) in inter-war Britain,' Archives of Natural History 3 (1988): 155-170.
48. Charles Elton, 'Research on rodent control by the Bureau of Animal Population, September 1939 to July 1947,' in Control of Rats and Mice, ed. by Dennis Chitty and H.N. Southern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 1-24.
49. John Sheail, 'Wartime rodent-control in England and Wales,' in The Front Line of Freedom. British Farming in the Second World War, ed. by Brian Short, Charles Watkins and John Martin (Exeter: British Agricultural History Society, 2006), pp. 55-66.
50. Elton 1954, p. 2; however, to document the wartime advances of the Bureau in rodent control, Elton mobilised the 1954 publication of a three-volume work, Control of Rats and Mice, ed. by Dennis Chitty and H.N. Southern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), with a summary by Elton as the first chapter. The research entailed population estimates, study of habitats and assessment of methods. The primary finding was that use of poison baits was the most efficacious approach and much of the research consisted of testing particular poisons and developing baiting stations that would attract rats or mice but minimise non-target impacts. This approach has been taken up with increasing success in rodent control for conservation purposes, with anticoagulant poisons, first developed as pesticides as the Bureau was winding down its rodent work after the war, replacing the chemicals that the Bureau advocated
51. see Desley A. Whisson, 'Pesticides (mammal),' in Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions, ed. by Daniel Simberloff and Marcel Rejmánek (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), pp. 535-538.
52. ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 245-252.
53. John Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology. The British Ecological Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 134.
54. ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 245; in Exploring the Animal World (1933, p. 81), Elton noted in passing, with respect to a justification for nature preserves, 'There is an attractiveness to me in the idea that the thousands of wild animal species that live with us on these islands have a right to go on living there, although when they become a menace to other things that we value, then we have to ignore these rights.'
55. Daniel Simberloff, 'Charles Elton-Neither founder nor siren, but prophet,' in Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology, ed. by David M. Richardson (New York: Wiley, 2010), pp. 11-24.
56. ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 253-256.
57. ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 255.
58. Committee of the British Ecological Society, 'Nature conservation and nature reserves,' Journal of Ecology 32 (1944): 45-82
59. Journal of Animal Ecology 13 (1944): 1-25.
60. Arthur G. Tansley, Our Heritage of Wild Nature: a Plea for Organised Nature Conservation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
61. Committee of the British Ecological Society. 'Nature conservation and nature reserves,' Journal of Animal Ecology 13 (1944):1-25, 14.
62. Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology, p. 139.
63. John Sheail, 'Applied ecology and the search for institutional support,' Environmental Review 13 (1989): 65-79.
64. Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology, p. 188.
65. Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists, p. 94.
66. Max Nicholson, The New Environmental Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 166.
67. Macfadyen 1992: 500.
68. Southwood and Clarke 1999: 142
69. cf. Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists, p. 95.
70. Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth, p. 43.
71. Macfadyen 1992: 500.
72. Macfadyen 1992: 500.
73. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London: Methuen, 1958).
74. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions, p. 143.
75. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions. pp. 145-153.
76. Kevin S. McCann, 'The diversity-stability debate,' Nature 405 (2000): 228-233.
77. Michel Loreau, Shahid Naeem and Pablo Inchausti (eds.) Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
78. Diane S. Srivastava and Mark Vellend, 'Biodiversity-ecosystem function research: Is it relevant to conservation?' Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 36 (2005): 267-294.
79. For example, Charles J. Krebs, Ecology, 6th ed. (San Francisco: Benjamin Cummings, 2009).
80. Charles S. Elton, The Pattern of Animal Communities (London: Methuen, 1966); Southwood and Clarke 1999: 144; Simberloff 2010.
81. Ricciardi and MacIsaac 2008; Richardson and Pyšek 2008.
82. William W. Murdoch, pers. comm. 2008.
83. Cf. Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth, p. 43.
84. Worster, Nature's Economy, p. 300; and Elton himself in Pattern, pp. 17 and 384.
85. Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 199.
86. Elton Pattern, p. 382.
87. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions, p. 100.
88. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions. p. 111.
89. Elton 1954.
90. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions p. 5
91. Charles S. Elton, 'Inquest on the world's mammal fauna,' Journal of Animal Ecology 14 (1945): 155-156.
92. Elton 1939: 390, referring to Fraser Darling's book, A Naturalist on Rona: Essays of a Biologist in Isolation.
93. ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 253-256.
94. Elton, Ecology of Invasions, p. 159: 'Would it not be good to be able to say, like John Muir, the Scotsman who became the great American prophet of wilderness conservation: "To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be. " Will we be able to talk like this in fifty years' time, as he could fifty years ago?'
95. Southwood and Clarke 1999.
96. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson. Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
97. Lisa H. Sideris, 'The secular and religious sources of Rachel Carson's sense of wonder,' in Sideris and Moore 2008, pp. 232-250.
98. Sideris 2008, p. 240.
99. Philip Cafaro, 'Rachel Carson's environmental ethics,' in Sideris and Moore 2008, pp. 60-78.
100. Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature. Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 52.
101. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature. Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 194.
102. Curt D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 16.
103. Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, p. 238.
104. Dunlap, Faith in Nature.
105. Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, p. 238.
106. David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
107. David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) p. 23.
108. Harry Goodwin, 'Sir Arthur George Tansley, F.R.S., 1871-1955,' Journal of Ecology 46 (1958): 1-8.
109. Harry Godwin, 'Sir Arthur Tansley: the man and the subject,' Journal of Ecology 65 (1977): 1-26.
110. Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology.
111. Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank. The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
112. John Sheail, Nature Conservation in Britain. The Formative Years (London: The Stationery Office, 1998).
113. Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth, p. 43.
114. Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, chapter 4.
115. Simberloff 2010.
116. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work.
117. Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey; see also Chew 2006.
118. Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity, p. 22; see also Chew 2006.
119. See in particular the letters cited in notes 28 and 37 above, as well as ALA, Biographical materials: Correspondence, Professional correspondence, 1937-1948, 297-303.
120. Worster, Nature's Economy, p. 300.
121. Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth, p. 45.
122. William S. Cooper, 'Sir Arthur Tansley and the science of ecology,' Ecology 38 (1957): 658-659.
123. Godwin 1958, 1977.
124. Arthur G. Tansley, Practical Plant Ecology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923).
125. Elton, Animal Ecology, p. 23.
126. Mathew A. Leibold and J. Timothy Wootton, 'Introduction,' in Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. xix-lvi.
127. Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists, p. 95.
128. Chisholm, Philosophers, p. 43.
129. Sheail 1989; see also Cooper 1957.
130. Godwin 1958, 1977.
131. Committee of the British Ecological Society, 'Nature conservation and nature reserves,' Journal of Ecology 32 (1944): 45-82
132. Journal of Animal Ecology 13 (1944): 1-25.
133. Arthur G. Tansley, Our Heritage of Wild Nature: a Plea for Organised Nature Conservation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
134. Sheail 1989 discusses Elton's major input to these committees.
135. Crowcroft, Elton's Ecologists, p. 95.
136. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work.
137. Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey.
138. J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, 'Introduction,' in Aldo Leopold For the Health of the Land, ed. by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), pp. 3-26.
139. Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth, pp. 39-53.
140. Simberloff 2010.