Eugenius Warming
Encyclopedia
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (3 November 1841 – 2 April 1924), known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish
botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology
. Warming wrote the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology
, taught the first university course in ecology and gave the concept its meaning and content.
“If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”.
Warming wrote a number of textbooks on botany, plant geography and ecology, which were translated to several languages and were immensely influential at their time and later. Most important were Plantesamfund
and Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik.
island of Mandø
as the only child of Jens Warming (1797–1844), parish minister, and Anna Marie von Bülow af Plüskow (1801–1863). After the early death of his father, he moved with his mother to her brother in Vejle
in eastern Jutland
.
He married Johanne Margrethe Jespersen (known as Hanne Warming; 1850–1922) on 10 November 1871. They had eight children: Marie (1872–1947) married C.V. Prytz, Jens Warming (1873–1939), who became a professor in economy and statistics at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College
, Fro (1875–1880), Povl (1877–1878), Svend Warming (1879–1982), engineer at Burmeister & Wain
shipyard, Inge (1879–1893), Johannes (1882–1970), farmer, and Louise (1884–1964).
External link: Ancestors and descendents
, but left university for three-and-a-half year (1863–1866) to act as secretary for the Danish palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund
, who lived and worked in Lagoa Santa
, Brazil
. After his return to Europe
, he studied for a year under K.F.P. Martius
, K.W. Nägeli
and Ludwig Radlkofer
in Munich
and, in 1871, under J.L. von Hanstein in Bonn
. Later in the same year (1871), he defended his Doctor of Philosophy
thesis at Copenhagen
.
The professorship in botany at the University of Copenhagen
became vacant with the death of A.S. Ørsted
and Warming was the obvious candidate for a successor. However, he was passed over and the chair given to the older, but much less productive and original Ferdinand Didrichsen
. Warming then became docent of botany
at the University of Copenhagen
, the polytechnic (Polyteknisk Læreanstalt) and the Pharmaceutical College
1873-1882. He became professor in botany at Stockholms högskola (later Stockholm University
) 1882-1885. As the eldest professor, he was elected rector magnificus. In 1885, he became professor in botany at the University of Copenhagen
and director of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden and held these positions until his retirement on 31 December 1910. He was rector magnificus of the University of Copenhagen
1907-1908.
He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
from 1878 to his death. As such, he served on the board of directors of the Carlsberg Foundation
1889-1921 and, because a biologist, on the board of the Carlsberg Laboratory
. He also served on the board of the Geological Survey of Denmark
1895-1917.
Eugen Warming was a frequent visitor to foreign universities, e.g. a travel to Strasbourg
and Paris
in 1876 and another to Göttingen, Jena, Bonn
, Strasbourg
and Paris
in 1880. He participated in several Scandinavian Scientist Conference
s between 1868 and 1916 and in the similar German
meeting in Breslau in 1874. He joined the International Botanical Congress
es in Amsterdam
1877, in Vienna
1905 and in Brussels
1910 and was president of the ‘Association internationale des botanistes‘ (1913). He attended the Linnaeus celebration in Uppsala
1907 and the Darwin
celebration in London
1908. He was honorary fellow of the Royal Society
in London, was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
in 1885 and honorary member of the Danish Botanical Society. He was a corresponding member of the botanical section of the French Academy of Sciences
.
He was made Commander 1st Degree of the Order of the Dannebrog
, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order
and the Brazilian Imperial Order of the Rose. He is buried in Assistants Cemetery in Copenhagen
.
In addition, shorter visits to the Alps
and other proximate destinations.
was based on Warming’s lectures on plant geography at the University of Copenhagen
. It gives an introduction to all major biomes of the world. Warming’s aim, and his major lasting impact on the development of ecology, was to explain how nature solved similar problems (drought, flooding, cold, salt, herbivory, etc.) in similar way, despite using very different ‘raw material’ (species of different origin) in different regions of the world. This was a remarkably modern view – completely different from the merely descriptive floristic plant geography prevailing during his time.
The subtitle alludes to the title of the book Grundtræk af den almindelige Plantegeografi, published in 1822 (German edn 1823: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Pflanzengeographie) by J.F. Schouw
, co-founder of the scientific phytogeography
.
Plantesamfund was translated to German
in 1896 as
A second, unauthorized, edition was issued during 1902 by Paul Graebner, who put his own name after Warming’s on the book’s frontispiece, despite no changes to the contents.
This edition was expanded in third and fourth editions:
A Polish
translation of ’Plantesamfund’ (from Knoblauch’s German translation) appeared in 1900:
Two independent Russian
(Moscow
and St. Petersburg) editions appeared in 1901 and 1903
An extended and translated edition in English first appeared in 1909:
The German ecologist A. F. W. Schimper
published ”Pflanzengeographie auf physiologisher Grundlage” in 1898.
. He wrote a number of botany
textbooks for the university level, as well as school books.
in Copenhagen
appeared in several editions and was translated to German
, Russian
and English
and used in foreign universities.
German edn 1890: Handbuch der systematischen Botanik by E. Knoblauch (2nd edn 1902, 3rd edn 1911, 4th edn 1929 all by M. Möbius).
Russian edn 1893: Систематика растеній (from the 3rd Danish edn by S. Rostovzev and M. Golenkin; 2nd edn 1898).
English edn 1895: A handbook of systematic botany (by M.C. Potter; several editions, latest 1932).
The section on seed plants was later expanded and issued as
, anatomy
and physiology
was translated to Swedish
and German
:
Warming Eug. Den almindelige Botanik: En Lærebog, nærmest til Brug for Studerende og Lærere [translated title: General Botany]. Kjøbenhavn, 1880. (2nd edn 1886; 3rd edn by Warming and Wilhelm Johannsen
1895; 4th edn by Warming and Johannsen
1900-01).
Swedish edn 1882: Lärobok i allmän botanik (by Axel N. Lundström).
German edn 1907-09: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik (from the 4th edn, by E. P. Meinecke). Berlin, Borntraeger. 667 pp.
Also, Warming's schoolbook on botany
was used abroad:
Warming Eug. (1900) Plantelivet: Lærebog i Botanik for Skoler og Seminarier [translated title: Plant Life]. København. (2nd edn 1902; 3rd edn 1905; 4th and 5th edns by C. Raunkiær
and Warming 1908 and 1914, respectively; 6th edn (1920) by E. Warming and Johs. Boye Petersen
).
English edn 1911: Plant Life - A Text-book of Botany for Schools and Colleges (from the 4th edn by M.M. Rehling and E.M. Thomas). London.
Russian
edn 1904: Растение и его жизнь (Началный учебник ботаники). (from the 2nd edn by L.M. Krečotovič and M. Golenkin). Moskva. Dutch
edns 1905, 1912 and 1919 Kern der plantkunde (by Dr. A.J.M. Garjeanne).
out of the lecture theatre. He used the botanic garden to demonstrate live plants, but to teach plant ecology
he needed students to get out in nature. The action radius from Copenhagen
offered by trips by foot was far too small, however. He applied to the government
and obtained a grant to take students on longer excursions every year from 1893; every third year these went to western Jutland
, once to Bornholm
, otherwise to Zealand. His excursion notes were published and are instructive introductions to the environment and plant adaptation
in dune
s, salt marsh
es and other habitat
s:
, 2600 plant species, of which some 370 turned out to be new to science, were treated in a monumental 40-volume and 1400-page work, Symbolæ ad Floram Brasiliæ centralis cognoscendam. For this work, Warming farmed out plant families to more than fifty plant taxonomists, mainly in Europe.
They were all published as volumes in the series ’Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den Naturhistoriske Forening i Kjøbenhavn’.
In addition, Warming treated the families Vochysiaceae
and Trigoniaceae
for the Flora Brasiliensis
:
, with which he had become acquainted during his stay in Brazil
. The plant species of this family are extremely modified by the harsh environment in which they live - they are angiosperms that resemble liverworts
.
Part I-V. All published in Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 6. Rk.
area, with cerrado
as the main vegetation type.
Warming issued a lengthy summary in French (1893): Lagoa Santa – Étude de Geographie Botanique. Revue Générale de Botanique 5: 145-158, 209-233.
Portuguese translation: Warming, Eugenio Lagoa Santa: Contribuição para a geographia phytobiologica, by Alberto Löfgren Belo Horizonte, 1908.
This edition was augmented by the Brazilian ecologist M.G. Ferri with more recent research on the cerrado
system and reissued as: Warming, E. & Ferri, M.G. (1973) Lagoa Santa – a vegetação de cerrados brasileiros. University of São Paulo.
research, and he soon became one of the most prominent workers in this branch of botany
. His main works from the early period are his thesis on floral development in Euphorbia and on seed plant ovules.
Warming's doctoral thesis (in Danish
) dealt with ontogeny of the cyathia
of Euphorbia (Euphorbiaceae
).
Part of the work was published in German
the year before the thesis:
His studies of pollen
and anther formation i Angiosperms and on the inflorescence of Asteraceae
were published in von Hanstein's Botanische Abhandlungen:
His studies on seed plant ovules were published in French
as
All these works a still cited in scientific papers by scholars of botany every now and then.http://www.amjbot.org.ludwig.lub.lu.se/cgi/content/abstract/94/10/1612
Through the 1870s, Warming became much-influenced by Darwinism
. The scope of his research changed. First towards understanding ontogenesis in the light of a common descent as seen in De l’Ovule, later towards plant adaptation
to environmental conditions. Again, his unparalleled ability to observe plants paired with his tropical experiencewas decisive to the route he chose.
Ch. 2), he commenced work on plant life-form
already during his Stockholm
years. In the paper
he presented a classification based on longevity of the plant, power of vegetative propagation, duration of tillers, hypogeous or epigeous type of shoots, mode of wintering, and degree and mode of branching of rhizome
s. The observation were made while raising wild plants from seed under garden conditions. In the late 1880s, after Warming's return to Copenhagen
, he swopped research topic with his student Christen Raunkiær
, who had traveled along the North Sea
coast from Jutland
to the Netherlands
and published on the phytogeography
of coastal vegetation
. Warming now worked on plant adaptation
s in dunes and salt marsh
es, while Raunkiær
studied the morphology of Danish
plants, eventually leading him to his plant life-form scheme. Nevertheless, after Raunkiær
had published his life-form scheme, Warming return to this topic in the work
Warming’s new scheme was less simple than Raunkiær's, taking other environmental factors than wintering into account, especially water/drought stress. Warming did not approve of what he saw as over-simplification in the Raunkiær scheme.
Warmings last published work was a renewed attempt to put all plant (including bacteria and algae) life forms into a system.
in 1884. On of the most important ones is his observations of the vegetation
of Greenland
and the history of the flora:
Warming's collections of leaves, stems and flowers, made during the brief expedition, were examined in detail and the anatomy
of a number of species described in a series of papers in Danish
. Later, Warming distributed the material family-wise, now ameliorated with collectections made later expeditions and elsewhere in the Arctic
, to students, who made further investigations and published the results in English
:
Warming, E. ed. (1908–1921) The structure and biology of Arctic flowering plants
. Meddelelser om Grønland
vol. 36: 1-481 and 37: 1-507.
Despite the language barrier, Warming’s influence on the development of ecology is remarkable, not the least in Britain and the USA. The British ecologist Arthur Tansley
was extremely influenced by reading ’Plantesamfund’ (or rather the 1896 German edition). Reading the book made him jump from anatomy to ecology. Tansley
used the book as textbook in a university course as early as 1899. Similarly, Warming's book was decisive in forming the careers of North American naturalists like Henry Chandler Cowles
. Cowles' now classic studies of Lake Michigan
sand dune plant communities were directly inspired by Warming's studies of Danish
dunes. Also Frederic Clements
was much inspired by Warming when starting to working with succession
, but more by Oscar Drude
in formulating his concept of vegetational climax in his 1916 book.
A more unexpected avenue of influence went through the American sociologist
Robert E. Park
, who read Warming's Oecology of Plants
and used the ideas of ecological succession
as inspiration for a notion of succession in human communities - a human ecology
.
Warming’s influence on later Scandinavian ecology was immense. Especially significant was his inspiration to Christen Raunkiær – his pupil and successor on the chair of botany at the University of Copenhagen
. In addition, he had a direct influence of Danish research, scientific and other, for a couple of decades. After his appointment to the professorship in Copenhagen
, he gradually took over Japetus Steenstrup
s power base, most notably as one of three members of the board of the Carlsberg Foundation
for 32 years. Thus, Warming had the upper hand in whom should be granted money and whom should not.
. In his popularizing book Nedstamningslæren (The theory of decendence; 1915), he reviewed the direct and indirect evidence for common decent of living organisms and for Darwinian
natural selection as a process involved in speciation
. His keen observations of how differently the same plant is grown under different circumstances (now known as phenotypic plasticity
) led him to question the change of species by infinitesimally small steps as advocated by his contemporary Darwinists
of the Biometry school, e.g. Karl Pearson
. Warming summarized his view on the ways in which new species could may arise: 1) By inheritance of acquired characters
; 2) By hybridization; 3) By natural selection
, with the latter mechanism being the least important.
that says: »In the beginning God created …«!”. Warming shared this view with many prominent contemporary naturalists, e.g. Alfred Russel Wallace
.
Politically, Warming was national-conservative, Scandinavist
and anti-Prussia
n. Warming was able to visit his birth place only a few times in his life because Schleswig
was conquered by Prussia
and Austria
in 1864 and (Northern Schleswig) returned to Denmark
in 1920. Warming expressed support, in letters, for France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War
. He made financial contributions to a secret fund that should support Danish-minded Schleswig
ian farmers in buying farms and prevent Germanization of Northern Schleswig. In a letter of 1898 to his son Jens, he regrets that the Højre
– the conservative party – would lose an upcoming election and expresses concern that anarchy and socialism will eventually rule.
Rchb.f.
and dozens of vascular plant species (http://www.ipni.org/ipni/advPlantNameSearch.do?find_family=&find_genus=&find_species=warming*&find_infrafamily=&find_infragenus=&find_infraspecies=&find_authorAbbrev=&find_includePublicationAuthors=on&find_includePublicationAuthors=off&find_includeBasionymAuthors=on&find_includeBasionymAuthors=off&find_publicationTitle=&find_isAPNIRecord=on&find_isAPNIRecord=false&find_isGCIRecord=on&find_isGCIRecord=false&find_isIKRecord=on&find_isIKRecord=false&find_rankToReturn=all&output_format=normal&find_sortByFamily=on&find_sortByFamily=off&query_type=by_query&back_page=plantsearchIPNI]) has been named to his honour. The same is the case for a number of fungi, e.g. the smut fungus
Microbotryum warmingii (Rostr.
) Vánky and the gall fungus
Arcticomyces warmingii (Rostr.
) Savile
. Warming Land
- a peninsula
in northernmost Greenland
is named for him.
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
has organized a series of 'Eugen Warming lectures in Evolutionary Ecology' since 1994.
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
. Warming wrote the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology
Plant ecology
Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution and abundance of plants, the interactions among and between members of plant species, and their interactions with their environment...
, taught the first university course in ecology and gave the concept its meaning and content.
“If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”.
Warming wrote a number of textbooks on botany, plant geography and ecology, which were translated to several languages and were immensely influential at their time and later. Most important were Plantesamfund
Plantesamfund
Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi, published in Danish in 1895 by Eugen Warming, and in English in 1909 as Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities, by Warming and Martin Vahl, was the first book to be published having the word ecology in its...
and Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik.
Early life and family life
Warming was born on the small Wadden SeaWadden Sea
The Wadden Sea is an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea. It lies between the coast of northwestern continental Europe and the range of Frisian Islands, forming a shallow body of water with tidal flats and wetlands. It is rich in biological diversity...
island of Mandø
Mandø
Mandø is one of the Danish Wadden Sea islands off the southwest coast of Jutland, Denmark in the Wadden Sea, part of the North Sea. The island covers an area of 7.63 km² and has 62 inhabitants...
as the only child of Jens Warming (1797–1844), parish minister, and Anna Marie von Bülow af Plüskow (1801–1863). After the early death of his father, he moved with his mother to her brother in Vejle
Vejle
Vejle is a town in Denmark, in the southeast of the Jutland Peninsula at the head of Vejle Fjord, where the Vejle and Grejs Rivers and their valleys converge. It is the site of the councils of Vejle Municipality and the Region of Southern Denmark...
in eastern Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...
.
He married Johanne Margrethe Jespersen (known as Hanne Warming; 1850–1922) on 10 November 1871. They had eight children: Marie (1872–1947) married C.V. Prytz, Jens Warming (1873–1939), who became a professor in economy and statistics at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College
University of Copenhagen Faculty of Life Sciences
The faculty previously known as the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University is located in Frederiksberg, Denmark and was established in 1856. As of 1 January 2007, the University merged with the University of Copenhagen...
, Fro (1875–1880), Povl (1877–1878), Svend Warming (1879–1982), engineer at Burmeister & Wain
MAN B&W Diesel
MAN Diesel SE was a provider of large-bore diesel engines for marine propulsion systems and power plant applications. MAN Diesel employs over 7,700 staff, primarily in Germany, Denmark, France, the Czech Republic, India and China...
shipyard, Inge (1879–1893), Johannes (1882–1970), farmer, and Louise (1884–1964).
External link: Ancestors and descendents
Education and career
He attended high school at Ribe Katedralskole and commenced 1859 studies of natural history at the University of CopenhagenUniversity of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
, but left university for three-and-a-half year (1863–1866) to act as secretary for the Danish palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund
Peter Wilhelm Lund
Peter Wilhelm Lund was a Danish paleontologist, zoologist, archeologist and who spent most of his life working and living in Brazil...
, who lived and worked in Lagoa Santa
Lagoa Santa
For Lagoa Santa, a municipality in Goiás see Lagoa Santa, GoiásLagoa Santa is a municipality and region in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil...
, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
. After his return to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, he studied for a year under K.F.P. Martius
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was a German botanist and explorer.Martius was born at Erlangen, where he graduated M.D. in 1814, publishing as his thesis a critical catalogue of plants in the botanic garden of the university...
, K.W. Nägeli
Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli
Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli was a Swiss botanist. He studied cell division and pollination, but became known as the man who discouraged Gregor Mendel from further work on genetics.-Birth and education:...
and Ludwig Radlkofer
Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer
Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer , was a noted Bavarian taxonomist and botanist, who was Professor of Botany at the University of Munich....
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
and, in 1871, under J.L. von Hanstein in Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
. Later in the same year (1871), he defended his Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
thesis at Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
.
The professorship in botany at the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
became vacant with the death of A.S. Ørsted
Anders Sandøe Ørsted (botanist)
Anders Sandøe Ørsted, also written as Anders Sandoe Oersted or Anders Sandö Örsted was a Danish botanist, mycologist, zoologist and marine biologist. He was nephew of the brothers physicist H.C...
and Warming was the obvious candidate for a successor. However, he was passed over and the chair given to the older, but much less productive and original Ferdinand Didrichsen
Ferdinand Didrichsen
Didrik Ferdinand Didrichsen was a Danish botanist and physicist. He participated as botanist in the first Galathea Expedition 1845–1847. In 1875, he succeeded A.S. Ørsted as professor of botany at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Botanic Garden, whereby the already then much better...
. Warming then became docent of botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
at the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
, the polytechnic (Polyteknisk Læreanstalt) and the Pharmaceutical College
University of Copenhagen Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences
The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences is a faculty of the University of Copenhagen. Originally The Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences, dating back to 1892, merged on 1 January 2007 with the University of Copenhagen....
1873-1882. He became professor in botany at Stockholms högskola (later Stockholm University
Stockholm University
Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...
) 1882-1885. As the eldest professor, he was elected rector magnificus. In 1885, he became professor in botany at the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
and director of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden and held these positions until his retirement on 31 December 1910. He was rector magnificus of the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
1907-1908.
He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters is a Danish non-governmental science Academy, founded 13 November 1742 by permission of the King Christian VI, as a historical Collegium Antiquitatum...
from 1878 to his death. As such, he served on the board of directors of the Carlsberg Foundation
Carlsberg Foundation
Carlsberg Foundation was founded by J. C. Jacobsen in 1876 and owns 30,3% of the shares in Carlsberg Group and has 74,2% of the voting power.The purpose of the foundation is to run and fund Carlsberg Laboratory, the museum at Frederiksborg Palace, to fund scientific research, run the Ny Carlsberg...
1889-1921 and, because a biologist, on the board of the Carlsberg Laboratory
Carlsberg Laboratory
The Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark was created in 1875 by J. C. Jacobsen, the founder of the Carlsberg brewery, for the sake of advancing biochemical knowledge, especially relating to brewing. It featured a Department of Chemistry and a Department of Physiology...
. He also served on the board of the Geological Survey of Denmark
Geus
GEUS is an abbreviation for Danmarks og Grønlands Geologiske Undersøgelse, the Danish name for the independent sector research institute under the Ministry of the Environment...
1895-1917.
Eugen Warming was a frequent visitor to foreign universities, e.g. a travel to Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1876 and another to Göttingen, Jena, Bonn
University of Bonn
The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...
, Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1880. He participated in several Scandinavian Scientist Conference
Scandinavian Scientist Conference
The Scandinavian Scientist Conferences was a series of meetings 1839-1936 for scientist and physicists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, later also Finland and Iceland, in the era Scandinavism...
s between 1868 and 1916 and in the similar German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
meeting in Breslau in 1874. He joined the International Botanical Congress
International Botanical Congress
International Botanical Congress is a large-scale meeting of botanists in all scientific fields, from all over the world. Authorized by the International Association of Botanical and Mycological Societies , congresses are held every six years with the venue circulating around the world. The XVIII...
es in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
1877, in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
1905 and in Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
1910 and was president of the ‘Association internationale des botanistes‘ (1913). He attended the Linnaeus celebration in Uppsala
Uppsala
- Economy :Today Uppsala is well established in medical research and recognized for its leading position in biotechnology.*Abbott Medical Optics *GE Healthcare*Pfizer *Phadia, an offshoot of Pharmacia*Fresenius*Q-Med...
1907 and the Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
celebration in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
1908. He was honorary fellow of the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
in London, was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2...
in 1885 and honorary member of the Danish Botanical Society. He was a corresponding member of the botanical section of the French Academy of Sciences
French Academy of Sciences
The French Academy of Sciences is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research...
.
He was made Commander 1st Degree of the Order of the Dannebrog
Order of the Dannebrog
The Order of the Dannebrog is an Order of Denmark, instituted in 1671 by Christian V. It resulted from a move in 1660 to break the absolutism of the nobility. The Order was only to comprise 50 noble Knights in one class plus the Master of the Order, i.e. the Danish monarch, and his sons...
, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order
Royal Victorian Order
The Royal Victorian Order is a dynastic order of knighthood and a house order of chivalry recognising distinguished personal service to the order's Sovereign, the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth realms, any members of her family, or any of her viceroys...
and the Brazilian Imperial Order of the Rose. He is buried in Assistants Cemetery in Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
.
Expeditions
- 1863-1866: Brasil, Lagoa SantaLagoa SantaFor Lagoa Santa, a municipality in Goiás see Lagoa Santa, GoiásLagoa Santa is a municipality and region in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil...
- 1884 GreenlandGreenlandGreenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...
(Fylla expeditionCarl Ryderthumb|right|200px|The schooner Fylla in Copenhagen harbourCarl Hartvig Ryder was a Danish naval officer and Arctic explorer.He was a member of several expeditions:...
- view images: Fylla near Qeqertarsuaq/Godhavn; Officers and scientists, Warming in the centre; Warming in umiaq with crew) - 1885: NorwayNorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
, FinnmarkFinnmarkor Finnmárku is a county in the extreme northeast of Norway. By land it borders Troms county to the west, Finland to the south and Russia to the east, and by water, the Norwegian Sea to the northwest, and the Barents Sea to the north and northeast.The county was formerly known as Finmarkens... - 1887: NorwayNorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
, DovreDovre regionDovre Region is a traditional district of Norway consisting of the municipalities of Dovre, Folldal, and Oppdal.This district is atypical in several respects: while most districts in Norway are bounded by geographical barriers such as fjords and mountain ranges, the Dovre region comprises alpine... - 1891-1892: VenezuelaVenezuelaVenezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
, TrinidadTrinidadTrinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...
and the Danish West IndiesDanish West IndiesThe Danish West Indies or "Danish Antilles", were a colony of Denmark-Norway and later Denmark in the Caribbean. They were sold to the United States in 1916 in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies and became the United States Virgin Islands in 1917... - 1895: Faroe IslandsFaroe IslandsThe Faroe Islands are an island group situated between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately halfway between Scotland and Iceland. The Faroe Islands are a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, along with Denmark proper and Greenland...
In addition, shorter visits to the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....
and other proximate destinations.
'Plantesamfund' or 'Oecology of Plants'
The book PlantesamfundPlantesamfund
Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi, published in Danish in 1895 by Eugen Warming, and in English in 1909 as Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities, by Warming and Martin Vahl, was the first book to be published having the word ecology in its...
was based on Warming’s lectures on plant geography at the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
. It gives an introduction to all major biomes of the world. Warming’s aim, and his major lasting impact on the development of ecology, was to explain how nature solved similar problems (drought, flooding, cold, salt, herbivory, etc.) in similar way, despite using very different ‘raw material’ (species of different origin) in different regions of the world. This was a remarkably modern view – completely different from the merely descriptive floristic plant geography prevailing during his time.
- Warming, E. (1895) Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi. P.G. Philipsens Forlag, Kjøbenhavn. 335 pp.
The subtitle alludes to the title of the book Grundtræk af den almindelige Plantegeografi, published in 1822 (German edn 1823: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Pflanzengeographie) by J.F. Schouw
Joakim Frederik Schouw
Joakim Frederik Schouw was a Danish lawyer, botanist and politician. From 1821, professor in botany at the University of Copenhagen - first extraordinary professor, but after the death of J.W. Hornemann in 1841 ordinary...
, co-founder of the scientific phytogeography
Phytogeography
Phytogeography , also called geobotany, is the branch of biogeography that is concerned with the geographic distribution of plant species...
.
Plantesamfund was translated to German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
in 1896 as
- Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie - Eine Einführung in die Kenntnis der Pflanzenvereine by Emil Knoblauch. Berlin, Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1896. 412 pp. This edition, which was approved by Warming, rapidly ran out of print.
A second, unauthorized, edition was issued during 1902 by Paul Graebner, who put his own name after Warming’s on the book’s frontispiece, despite no changes to the contents.
- Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie - Eine Einführung in die Kenntnis der Pflanzenvereine; "Nach der neuesten Litteratur Vervollständigt bei Paul Graebner"; Berlin, Gebrüder Borntraeger.
This edition was expanded in third and fourth editions:
- Warming, E. & Graebner, P. (1918) Eug. Warming's Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie, 3 ed. Berlin, Gebrüder Borntrager. Fourth edn (1933) - 1158 pp.
A Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
translation of ’Plantesamfund’ (from Knoblauch’s German translation) appeared in 1900:
- Warming, E. (1900) Zbiorowiska Roślinne zarys ekologicznej geografii roślin by Edward Strumpf and Jósef Trzebiński. Warszawa, 1900. 451 pp.
Two independent Russian
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
(Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
and St. Petersburg) editions appeared in 1901 and 1903
- Вармингъ, Е. (1901) Ойкологическая географія растеній – Введеніе въ изученіе растительныхъ сообществъ by M. Golenkin and W. Arnol'di. Moskva, 542 pp. Full text link http://www.abratsev.narod.ru/biblio/varming/varming.html
- Вармингъ, Е. (1903) Распредъленіе растений въ зависимости отъ внъшнихъ условій - Экологическая географія растеній by A. G. Henkel' and with a treatise of the vegetation of Russia by G. I. Tanfil'ev. St. Petersburg, 474 pp.
An extended and translated edition in English first appeared in 1909:
- Warming, E. with M. Vahl (1909) Oecology of Plants - an introduction to the study of plant-communities by P. Groom and I. B. BalfourIsaac Bayley BalfourSir Isaac Bayley Balfour FRS FRSE was a Scottish botanist. He was the son of John Hutton Balfour who was also a botanist.-Biography:...
. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 422 pp. (2nd edn 1925).
The German ecologist A. F. W. Schimper
Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper
Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper was a botanist and phytogeographer who made major contributions in the fields of histology, ecology and plant geography.-Biography:...
published ”Pflanzengeographie auf physiologisher Grundlage” in 1898.
"This work not only covered much of the same ground as Warming did in 1895 and 1896 but in fact also leaned heavily on Warming’s research. Schimper (1898) quoted extensively from more than fifteen of Warming’s works and even reproduced Warming’s figures. Yet nowhere did Schimper acknowledge his profound debt to Warming, neither in the list of picture credits, nor in the acknowledgements section of the Vorwort, nor in his list of major sources, and not even in a footnote! ... Although replete with Warming’s data, it contains few ideas and did not advance ecology beyond what Warming had done earlier.”
Warming as a teacher
Warming was a skillful and dedicated pedagogue, whose presentation of the subject was useful far beyond his lecture theatre in CopenhagenCopenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
. He wrote a number of botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
textbooks for the university level, as well as school books.
Handbook of systematic botany
Warming's textbook on systematics for his lectures of botanyBotany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
in Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
appeared in several editions and was translated to German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and used in foreign universities.
- Warming, E. (1878) Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik (nærmest til Brug for Universitets-Studerende og Lærere). København. (2nd edn 1884; 3rd ed with Algae by N. Wille and fungi by E. RostrupEmil RostrupFrederik Georg Emil Rostrup was a Danish botanist, mycologist and plant pathologist.From 1858, Emil Rostrup was a teacher at the paedagogical college Skårup Seminarium in then new subject natural history. He educated to-be school teachers for 25 years...
1891).
German edn 1890: Handbuch der systematischen Botanik by E. Knoblauch (2nd edn 1902, 3rd edn 1911, 4th edn 1929 all by M. Möbius).
Russian edn 1893: Систематика растеній (from the 3rd Danish edn by S. Rostovzev and M. Golenkin; 2nd edn 1898).
English edn 1895: A handbook of systematic botany (by M.C. Potter; several editions, latest 1932).
The section on seed plants was later expanded and issued as
- Warming Eug. (1912) Frøplanterne (Spermatofyter) [translated title: Seed Plants]. Kjøbenhavn, Gyldendalske Boghandel/Nordisk Forlag. 467 pp. (2nd edn 1933). The sections on spore plants were updated and published separately as
- Rosenvinge L. KolderupLauritz Kolderup RosenvingeJanus Lauritz Andreas Kolderup Rosenvinge was a Danish botanist and phycologist. He took his Ph.D. 1888 from the University of Copenhagen. He was docent of botany at the polytechnic from 1900, and extraordinary professor of botany the University of Copenhagen with focus on spore plants from 1916...
(1913) Sporeplanterne (Kryptogamerne). Kjöbenhavn, Gyldendalske Boghandel/Nordisk Forlag. 388 pp.
Handbook of general botany
Warming's textbook on plant morphologyMorphology (biology)
In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....
, anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
and physiology
Physiology
Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
was translated to Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
:
Warming Eug. Den almindelige Botanik: En Lærebog, nærmest til Brug for Studerende og Lærere [translated title: General Botany]. Kjøbenhavn, 1880. (2nd edn 1886; 3rd edn by Warming and Wilhelm Johannsen
Wilhelm Johannsen
Wilhelm Johannsen was a Danish botanist, plant physiologist and geneticist. He was born in Copenhagen. While very young, he was apprenticed to a pharmacist and worked in Denmark and Germany beginning in 1872 until passing his pharmacist's exam in 1879...
1895; 4th edn by Warming and Johannsen
Wilhelm Johannsen
Wilhelm Johannsen was a Danish botanist, plant physiologist and geneticist. He was born in Copenhagen. While very young, he was apprenticed to a pharmacist and worked in Denmark and Germany beginning in 1872 until passing his pharmacist's exam in 1879...
1900-01).
Swedish edn 1882: Lärobok i allmän botanik (by Axel N. Lundström).
German edn 1907-09: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik (from the 4th edn, by E. P. Meinecke). Berlin, Borntraeger. 667 pp.
Also, Warming's schoolbook on botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
was used abroad:
Warming Eug. (1900) Plantelivet: Lærebog i Botanik for Skoler og Seminarier [translated title: Plant Life]. København. (2nd edn 1902; 3rd edn 1905; 4th and 5th edns by C. Raunkiær
Christen C. Raunkiær
Christen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's...
and Warming 1908 and 1914, respectively; 6th edn (1920) by E. Warming and Johs. Boye Petersen
Johannes Boye Petersen
Johannes Boye Petersen was a Danish botanist and phycologist, mainly working on diatoms.-Selected scientic works:*Studies on the Biology and Taxonomy of Soil Algae. Dansk Botanisk Arkiv vol. 8 : 1-183. 1935....
).
English edn 1911: Plant Life - A Text-book of Botany for Schools and Colleges (from the 4th edn by M.M. Rehling and E.M. Thomas). London.
Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
edn 1904: Растение и его жизнь (Началный учебник ботаники). (from the 2nd edn by L.M. Krečotovič and M. Golenkin). Moskva. Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
edns 1905, 1912 and 1919 Kern der plantkunde (by Dr. A.J.M. Garjeanne).
Excursions
Warming felt a strong need to take students of botanyBotany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
out of the lecture theatre. He used the botanic garden to demonstrate live plants, but to teach plant ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
he needed students to get out in nature. The action radius from Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
offered by trips by foot was far too small, however. He applied to the government
Government of Denmark
Denmark is a constitutional monarchy with a representative democracy based on a unicameral parliamentary system. The affairs of Government are decided by a Cabinet of Ministers, which is led by a Prime Minister...
and obtained a grant to take students on longer excursions every year from 1893; every third year these went to western Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...
, once to Bornholm
Bornholm
Bornholm is a Danish island in the Baltic Sea located to the east of the rest of Denmark, the south of Sweden, and the north of Poland. The main industries on the island include fishing, arts and crafts like glass making and pottery using locally worked clay, and dairy farming. Tourism is...
, otherwise to Zealand. His excursion notes were published and are instructive introductions to the environment and plant adaptation
Adaptation
An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....
in dune
Dune
In physical geography, a dune is a hill of sand built by wind. Dunes occur in different forms and sizes, formed by interaction with the wind. Most kinds of dunes are longer on the windward side where the sand is pushed up the dune and have a shorter "slip face" in the lee of the wind...
s, salt marsh
Salt marsh
A salt marsh is an environment in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and salt water or brackish water, it is dominated by dense stands of halophytic plants such as herbs, grasses, or low shrubs. These plants are terrestrial in origin and are essential to the stability of the salt marsh...
es and other habitat
Habitat
* Habitat , a place where a species lives and grows*Human habitat, a place where humans live, work or play** Space habitat, a space station intended as a permanent settlement...
s:
- Warming, E. (1890) Botaniske Exkursioner 1. Fra Vesterhavskystens Marskegne. Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den Naturhistoriske Forening i Kjøbenhavn 1890.
- Warming, E. (1891) Botaniske Exkursioner 2. De psammophile Formationer i Danmark. Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den Naturhistoriske Forening i Kjøbenhavn 1891: 153-202.
- Warming, E. (1891) Botaniske Exkursioner 3. Skarridsø. Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den Naturhistoriske Forening i Kjøbenhavn 1891.
Further scientific works of E. Warming
Plant systematics
His early experience with vegetation in a tropical region was decisive for his future work. His collections from Lagoa SantaLagoa Santa
For Lagoa Santa, a municipality in Goiás see Lagoa Santa, GoiásLagoa Santa is a municipality and region in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil...
, 2600 plant species, of which some 370 turned out to be new to science, were treated in a monumental 40-volume and 1400-page work, Symbolæ ad Floram Brasiliæ centralis cognoscendam. For this work, Warming farmed out plant families to more than fifty plant taxonomists, mainly in Europe.
- Symbolæ ad Floram Brasiliæ centralis cognoscendam, particulæ 1-10, 1873
- Symbolæ 11-20, 1875
- Symbolæ 21-30, 1886
- Symbolæ 31-40, 1893
- Symbolæ 31-40, 1893. E.g. Particula XXXIX, Enumeratio Myrtacearum Brasiliensium by Hjalmar Kiærskou.
They were all published as volumes in the series ’Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den Naturhistoriske Forening i Kjøbenhavn’.
In addition, Warming treated the families Vochysiaceae
Vochysiaceae
Vochysiaceae is a plant family belonging to the order of Myrtales.-Description:Trees or shrubs with opposite leaves; flowers are zygomorph 1--5 merous; ovary inferior or superior; one fertile stamen; fruits samara or capsules-Biogeography:...
and Trigoniaceae
Trigoniaceae
Trigoniaceae is a family of flowering plants, consisting of 28 species in 4 genera. It is a tropical family found in Madagascar, Southeast Asia, Central and South America....
for the Flora Brasiliensis
Flora Brasiliensis
Flora Brasiliensis is a book published between 1840 and 1906 by the editors Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, August Wilhelm Eichler, Ignatz Urban and many others...
:
- VochysiaceaeVochysiaceaeVochysiaceae is a plant family belonging to the order of Myrtales.-Description:Trees or shrubs with opposite leaves; flowers are zygomorph 1--5 merous; ovary inferior or superior; one fertile stamen; fruits samara or capsules-Biogeography:...
et TrigoniaceaeTrigoniaceaeTrigoniaceae is a family of flowering plants, consisting of 28 species in 4 genera. It is a tropical family found in Madagascar, Southeast Asia, Central and South America....
. Flora BrasiliensisFlora BrasiliensisFlora Brasiliensis is a book published between 1840 and 1906 by the editors Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, August Wilhelm Eichler, Ignatz Urban and many others...
, Eichler, A.G. ed.: Vol. XIII, Part II, Fasc. 67, Column 16-116. MonachiiMunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, 1875.
His favourite plant family: Etudes sur la famille des Podostemacees
Warming held a special interest in the family PodostemaceaePodostemaceae
The Podostemaceae is a family in the order Malpighiales. It comprises about 50 genera and 250 species of more or less thalloid aquatic herbs....
, with which he had become acquainted during his stay in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
. The plant species of this family are extremely modified by the harsh environment in which they live - they are angiosperms that resemble liverworts
Marchantiophyta
The Marchantiophyta are a division of bryophyte plants commonly referred to as hepatics or liverworts. Like other bryophytes, they have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of genetic information....
.
- Warming, E. (1881–1899) Familien Podostemaceae - Etudes sur la famille des Podostemacees.
Part I-V. All published in Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 6. Rk.
Lagoa Santa
Having finished the taxonomical work, Warming finally published his ecological study of plant communities in the Lagoa SantaLagoa Santa
For Lagoa Santa, a municipality in Goiás see Lagoa Santa, GoiásLagoa Santa is a municipality and region in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil...
area, with cerrado
Cerrado
The Cerrado, is a vast tropical savanna ecoregion of Brazil, particularly in the states of Gioas and Minas Gerais...
as the main vegetation type.
- Warming, E. (1892) Lagoa Santa: Et Bidrag til den biologiske Plantegeografi med en Fortegnelse over Lagoa Santas Hvirveldyr. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 6. Rk. vol. 6 (3): 153-488.
Warming issued a lengthy summary in French (1893): Lagoa Santa – Étude de Geographie Botanique. Revue Générale de Botanique 5: 145-158, 209-233.
Portuguese translation: Warming, Eugenio Lagoa Santa: Contribuição para a geographia phytobiologica, by Alberto Löfgren Belo Horizonte, 1908.
This edition was augmented by the Brazilian ecologist M.G. Ferri with more recent research on the cerrado
Cerrado
The Cerrado, is a vast tropical savanna ecoregion of Brazil, particularly in the states of Gioas and Minas Gerais...
system and reissued as: Warming, E. & Ferri, M.G. (1973) Lagoa Santa – a vegetação de cerrados brasileiros. University of São Paulo.
Organogenetic studies
Early on in Warming’s scientific career, the morphological-organogenetic point of was the leading principle in botanicalBotany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
research, and he soon became one of the most prominent workers in this branch of botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
. His main works from the early period are his thesis on floral development in Euphorbia and on seed plant ovules.
Warming's doctoral thesis (in Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
) dealt with ontogeny of the cyathia
Cyathium
A cyathium is one of the specialised pseudanthia forming the inflorescence of plants in the genus Euphorbia . A cyathium consists of:...
of Euphorbia (Euphorbiaceae
Euphorbiaceae
Euphorbiaceae, the Spurge family are a large family of flowering plants with 300 genera and around 7,500 species. Most are herbs, but some, especially in the tropics, are also shrubs or trees. Some are succulent and resemble cacti....
).
- Warming, J. Eug. B. 1871. Koppen hos Vortemælken en Blomst eller en Blomsterstand? En organogenetisk morfologisk Undersøgelse. FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
summary: Le cyathium de l"Euphorbia est-il une fleure ou une inflorescence? KjøbenhavnCopenhagenCopenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
, G.E.C. Gad.
Part of the work was published in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
the year before the thesis:
- Warming, E. 1870. Über die Entwicklung des Blütenstandes von Euphorbia. Flora 53: 385-397.
His studies of pollen
Pollen
Pollen is a fine to coarse powder containing the microgametophytes of seed plants, which produce the male gametes . Pollen grains have a hard coat that protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement from the stamens to the pistil of flowering plants or from the male cone to the...
and anther formation i Angiosperms and on the inflorescence of Asteraceae
Asteraceae
The Asteraceae or Compositae , is an exceedingly large and widespread family of vascular plants. The group has more than 22,750 currently accepted species, spread across 1620 genera and 12 subfamilies...
were published in von Hanstein's Botanische Abhandlungen:
- Warming, E. (1873) Untersuchungen über pollenbildende Phyllome und Kaulome. Botanische Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Morphologie und Physiologie, 2 (2): 1-90.
- Warming, E. (1876) Die Blüte der Kompositen. Botanische Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Morphologie und Physiologie, 3 (2): 1-167.
His studies on seed plant ovules were published in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
as
- Warming, E. 1878. De l’Ovule. Annales des Sciences Naturelles - Botanique et Biologie Vegetale sér. 6: 177-266.
All these works a still cited in scientific papers by scholars of botany every now and then.http://www.amjbot.org.ludwig.lub.lu.se/cgi/content/abstract/94/10/1612
Through the 1870s, Warming became much-influenced by Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
. The scope of his research changed. First towards understanding ontogenesis in the light of a common descent as seen in De l’Ovule, later towards plant adaptation
Adaptation
An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....
to environmental conditions. Again, his unparalleled ability to observe plants paired with his tropical experiencewas decisive to the route he chose.
Plant life-form
Although Warming did not coin the term life-form until 1895 (in PlantesamfundPlantesamfund
Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi, published in Danish in 1895 by Eugen Warming, and in English in 1909 as Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities, by Warming and Martin Vahl, was the first book to be published having the word ecology in its...
Ch. 2), he commenced work on plant life-form
Plant life-form
Plant life-form schemes constitute a way of classifying plants alternatively to the ordinary species-genus-family scientific classification. In colloquial speech, plants may be classified as trees, shrubs, herbs , etc...
already during his Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
years. In the paper
- Warming, E. (1884) Om Skudbygning, Overvintring og Foryngelse [translated title: On shoot architecture, perennation and rejuvenation]. Naturhistorisk Forenings Festskrift: 1-105. Line drawings,
he presented a classification based on longevity of the plant, power of vegetative propagation, duration of tillers, hypogeous or epigeous type of shoots, mode of wintering, and degree and mode of branching of rhizome
Rhizome
In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...
s. The observation were made while raising wild plants from seed under garden conditions. In the late 1880s, after Warming's return to Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
, he swopped research topic with his student Christen Raunkiær
Christen C. Raunkiær
Christen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's...
, who had traveled along the North Sea
North Sea
In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...
coast from Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...
to the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and published on the phytogeography
Phytogeography
Phytogeography , also called geobotany, is the branch of biogeography that is concerned with the geographic distribution of plant species...
of coastal vegetation
Vegetation
Vegetation is a general term for the plant life of a region; it refers to the ground cover provided by plants. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular taxa, life forms, structure, spatial extent, or any other specific botanical or geographic characteristics. It is broader...
. Warming now worked on plant adaptation
Adaptation
An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....
s in dunes and salt marsh
Salt marsh
A salt marsh is an environment in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and salt water or brackish water, it is dominated by dense stands of halophytic plants such as herbs, grasses, or low shrubs. These plants are terrestrial in origin and are essential to the stability of the salt marsh...
es, while Raunkiær
Christen C. Raunkiær
Christen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's...
studied the morphology of Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
plants, eventually leading him to his plant life-form scheme. Nevertheless, after Raunkiær
Christen C. Raunkiær
Christen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's...
had published his life-form scheme, Warming return to this topic in the work
- Warming, E. (1908) Om planterigets livsformer [translated title: On the life forms in the vegetable kingdom]. G.E.C. Gad, København.
Warming’s new scheme was less simple than Raunkiær's, taking other environmental factors than wintering into account, especially water/drought stress. Warming did not approve of what he saw as over-simplification in the Raunkiær scheme.
Warmings last published work was a renewed attempt to put all plant (including bacteria and algae) life forms into a system.
- Warming, E. (1923) Økologiens Grundformer – Udkast til en systematisk Ordning [translated title: Fundamental ecological forms - draft for a system]. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 8. Rk., vol. 4: 120-187.
Greenland, Iceland and Faroe Islands
Warmings published a number of treatises based on his expedition to Southwest GreenlandGreenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...
in 1884. On of the most important ones is his observations of the vegetation
Vegetation
Vegetation is a general term for the plant life of a region; it refers to the ground cover provided by plants. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular taxa, life forms, structure, spatial extent, or any other specific botanical or geographic characteristics. It is broader...
of Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...
and the history of the flora:
- Warming, E. (1887) Om Grønlands Vegetation [translated title: On the vegetation of Greenland]. Meddelelser om GrønlandMeddelelser om GrønlandMeddelelser om Grønland was a Danish scientific periodical issued by the Commission for Scientific Investigations in Greenland. Founded by Frederik Johnstrup, it was published from 1879 to 1979...
12: 1-223. A summary was published as: - Warming, E. (1888) Über Grönlands Vegetation. Englers Botanische Jahrbücher, 10. Following the publication of this paper, Warming entered a dispute with A.G. NathorstAlfred Gabriel NathorstAlfred Gabriel Nathorst was a Swedish Arctic explorer, geologist and palaeobotanist. Nathorst was born in Väderbrunn outside Nyköping and died in Stockholm.-Biography:He was born on November 7, 1850....
over the history of the flora of Greenland.
Warming's collections of leaves, stems and flowers, made during the brief expedition, were examined in detail and the anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
of a number of species described in a series of papers in Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
. Later, Warming distributed the material family-wise, now ameliorated with collectections made later expeditions and elsewhere in the Arctic
Arctic
The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...
, to students, who made further investigations and published the results in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
:
Warming, E. ed. (1908–1921) The structure and biology of Arctic flowering plants
The structure and biology of Arctic flowering plants
The Structure and Biology of Arctic Flowering Plants is a classical scientific work on morphology and anatomy in relation to the harsh arctic environment. It was initiated by Eugenius Warming and conducted by himself and a suite of students and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen.Warming, E....
. Meddelelser om Grønland
Meddelelser om Grønland
Meddelelser om Grønland was a Danish scientific periodical issued by the Commission for Scientific Investigations in Greenland. Founded by Frederik Johnstrup, it was published from 1879 to 1979...
vol. 36: 1-481 and 37: 1-507.
- Warming, E. ed. (1901–1908) Botany of the FæröesBotany of the FaeroesBotany of the Færöes based upon Danish investigations – a three-volume classic scientific work on flora and vegetation of the Faroe Islands, including fungi, lichens, algae, bryophytes and vascular plants. It was published 1901 to 1908 and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. The project was...
- based upon Danish investigations, vol. I-III. Copenhagen and London.
- Rosenvinge, L. KolderupLauritz Kolderup RosenvingeJanus Lauritz Andreas Kolderup Rosenvinge was a Danish botanist and phycologist. He took his Ph.D. 1888 from the University of Copenhagen. He was docent of botany at the polytechnic from 1900, and extraordinary professor of botany the University of Copenhagen with focus on spore plants from 1916...
& Warning, E. (eds) (1912–1932) The Botany of IcelandThe Botany of IcelandThe Botany of Iceland – a five-volume classic scientific work on flora and vegetation of Iceland, including fungi, lichens, algae, bryophytes and vascular plants. It was published 1912 to 1949 and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation...
, vol. 1-3. Copenhagen, J. Frimodt. Continued in vols 4-5 edited by Johannes GrøntvedJohannes GrøntvedJohannes Grøntved was a Danish botanist. He made investigations of flora and vegetation in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Estonia. He was editor of The Botany of Iceland from vol. 3 part 2.-Selected scientific works:...
, Ove PaulsenOve PaulsenOve Vilhelm Paulsen was a Danish botanist. He studeied at the University of Copenhagen under professor Eugen Warming. He was a keeper at the Botanical Museum of the University of Copenhagen from 1905 to 1920, when he became professor of botany at the Pharmaceutical College in Copenhagen, a...
and Thorvald SørensenThorvald SørensenThorvald Julius Sørensen was a Danish botanist and evolutionary biologist.Sørensen was professor at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College 1953-1955 and at the University of Copenhagen 1955-1972...
. Full text of Vol. 1 (part 1 and part 2) and Vol. 2 (part 1).
Vegetation of Denmark
- Warming, E. 1904. Bidrag til Vadernes, Sandenes og Marskens Naturhistorie (with contributions of C. Wesenberg-LundCarl Wesenberg-LundCarl Jørgen Wesenberg-Lund , Dr.Phil., professor of limnology 1922-1939 at the University of Copenhagen, was a Danish zoologist and freshwater ecologist. He was a pioneer in Danish nature conservation early in the 20th century. He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters...
, E. ØstrupErnst ØstrupErnst Vilhelm Østrup was a Danish botanist and phycologist, mainly working on diatoms.-Selected scientific works:* Ferskvands-Diatoméer fra Øst-Grønland. Meddelelser om Grønland 15: 251-290. 1898....
&c). Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 7. Rk., 2: 1-56. - Warming, E. 1906. Dansk Plantevækst. 1. Strandvegetationen. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [beach vegetation]
- Warming, E. 1909. Dansk Plantevækst. 2. Klitterne. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [dunes]
- Warming, E. 1917. Dansk Plantevækst. 3. Skovene. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [forests]
Warming’s influence
It was Eugenius Warming's Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie that must be considered as the starting point of self-conscious ecology. This book was the first to use physiological relations between plants and their environment, and in addition biotic interactions to explain the moulding of the assemblages that plant geographers had described and classified, and it would set up a research agenda for decades to come.
Despite the language barrier, Warming’s influence on the development of ecology is remarkable, not the least in Britain and the USA. The British ecologist Arthur Tansley
Arthur Tansley
Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. He obtained his degree in Biological Science in 1896, with specialization in botany and zoology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed...
was extremely influenced by reading ’Plantesamfund’ (or rather the 1896 German edition). Reading the book made him jump from anatomy to ecology. Tansley
Arthur Tansley
Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. He obtained his degree in Biological Science in 1896, with specialization in botany and zoology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed...
used the book as textbook in a university course as early as 1899. Similarly, Warming's book was decisive in forming the careers of North American naturalists like Henry Chandler Cowles
Henry Chandler Cowles
Henry Chandler Cowles was an American botanist and ecological pioneer . Born in Kensington, Connecticut, he attended Oberlin College in Ohio. He studied at the University of Chicago with the plant taxonomist John M. Coulter and the geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin as main teachers. He...
. Cowles' now classic studies of Lake Michigan
Lake Michigan
Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America and the only one located entirely within the United States. It is the second largest of the Great Lakes by volume and the third largest by surface area, after Lake Superior and Lake Huron...
sand dune plant communities were directly inspired by Warming's studies of Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
dunes. Also Frederic Clements
Frederic Clements
Frederic Edward Clements was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of vegetation succession.-Biography:...
was much inspired by Warming when starting to working with succession
Ecological succession
Ecological succession, is the phenomenon or process by which a community progressively transforms itself until a stable community is formed. It is a fundamental concept in ecology, and refers to more or less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community...
, but more by Oscar Drude
Carl Georg Oscar Drude
Carl Georg Oscar Drude was a German botanist.- References :...
in formulating his concept of vegetational climax in his 1916 book.
A more unexpected avenue of influence went through the American sociologist
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
Robert E. Park
Robert E. Park
Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist, one of the main founders of the original Chicago School of sociology.-Life:...
, who read Warming's Oecology of Plants
Plantesamfund
Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi, published in Danish in 1895 by Eugen Warming, and in English in 1909 as Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities, by Warming and Martin Vahl, was the first book to be published having the word ecology in its...
and used the ideas of ecological succession
Ecological succession
Ecological succession, is the phenomenon or process by which a community progressively transforms itself until a stable community is formed. It is a fundamental concept in ecology, and refers to more or less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community...
as inspiration for a notion of succession in human communities - a human ecology
Human ecology
Human ecology is the subdiscipline of ecology that focuses on humans. More broadly, it is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The term 'human ecology' first appeared in a sociological study in 1921...
.
Warming’s influence on later Scandinavian ecology was immense. Especially significant was his inspiration to Christen Raunkiær – his pupil and successor on the chair of botany at the University of Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
. In addition, he had a direct influence of Danish research, scientific and other, for a couple of decades. After his appointment to the professorship in Copenhagen
University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...
, he gradually took over Japetus Steenstrup
Japetus Steenstrup
Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup was a Danish zoologist, biologist, and professor.He was a professor of zoology at the University of Copenhagen...
s power base, most notably as one of three members of the board of the Carlsberg Foundation
Carlsberg Foundation
Carlsberg Foundation was founded by J. C. Jacobsen in 1876 and owns 30,3% of the shares in Carlsberg Group and has 74,2% of the voting power.The purpose of the foundation is to run and fund Carlsberg Laboratory, the museum at Frederiksborg Palace, to fund scientific research, run the Ny Carlsberg...
for 32 years. Thus, Warming had the upper hand in whom should be granted money and whom should not.
Warming and evolution
Warming was a firm believer in adaptation. However, he was a declared LamarckistLamarckism
Lamarckism is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring . It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories...
. In his popularizing book Nedstamningslæren (The theory of decendence; 1915), he reviewed the direct and indirect evidence for common decent of living organisms and for Darwinian
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
natural selection as a process involved in speciation
Speciation
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. The biologist Orator F. Cook seems to have been the first to coin the term 'speciation' for the splitting of lineages or 'cladogenesis,' as opposed to 'anagenesis' or 'phyletic evolution' occurring within lineages...
. His keen observations of how differently the same plant is grown under different circumstances (now known as phenotypic plasticity
Phenotypic plasticity
Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. Such plasticity in some cases expresses as several highly morphologically distinct results; in other cases, a continuous norm of reaction describes the functional interrelationship...
) led him to question the change of species by infinitesimally small steps as advocated by his contemporary Darwinists
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
of the Biometry school, e.g. Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....
. Warming summarized his view on the ways in which new species could may arise: 1) By inheritance of acquired characters
Inheritance of acquired characters
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is a hypothesis that physiological changes acquired over the life of an organism may be transmitted to offspring...
; 2) By hybridization; 3) By natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
, with the latter mechanism being the least important.
Warming, religion and politics
Warming was raised in a Christian Protestant home and he continued to be religious throughout his life. He accepted the evolution by descent of living beings, but believed that laws governing planets’ orbits and other laws governing organic evolution were God-given. In his popular book Nedstamningslæren (translated title: Evolution by descent), he concludes the section on hypotheses about the origin of life writing that, no matter what hypothesis is considered, it just “defers the grand question: how did life first come into existence, »in the beginning«? … as if we human beings thereby obtained understanding and explanation for anything at all, or circumvented the almighty power that, incomprehensibly to our mind, must have created matter, force, time and infinite space. Science has not disproven the BibleBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
that says: »In the beginning God created …«!”. Warming shared this view with many prominent contemporary naturalists, e.g. Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist...
.
Politically, Warming was national-conservative, Scandinavist
Scandinavism
Scandinavism and Nordism are literary and political movements that support various degrees of cooperation between the Scandinavian or Nordic countries...
and anti-Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
n. Warming was able to visit his birth place only a few times in his life because Schleswig
Schleswig
Schleswig or South Jutland is a region covering the area about 60 km north and 70 km south of the border between Germany and Denmark; the territory has been divided between the two countries since 1920, with Northern Schleswig in Denmark and Southern Schleswig in Germany...
was conquered by Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
and Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
in 1864 and (Northern Schleswig) returned to Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
in 1920. Warming expressed support, in letters, for France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
. He made financial contributions to a secret fund that should support Danish-minded Schleswig
Schleswig
Schleswig or South Jutland is a region covering the area about 60 km north and 70 km south of the border between Germany and Denmark; the territory has been divided between the two countries since 1920, with Northern Schleswig in Denmark and Southern Schleswig in Germany...
ian farmers in buying farms and prevent Germanization of Northern Schleswig. In a letter of 1898 to his son Jens, he regrets that the Højre
Conservative People's Party (Denmark)
The Conservative People's Party , also known as Conservatives is a Danish political party.-History:The party was founded 1915 based mostly on its predecessor, Højre , but also on the Free Conservatives and a moderate faction of Venstre , the liberals.The party has participated in several coalition...
– the conservative party – would lose an upcoming election and expresses concern that anarchy and socialism will eventually rule.
Miscellaneous
The Orchid genus WarmingiaWarmingia
Warmingia is a genus of orchid belonging to the subfamily Epidendroideae within the Orchidaceae family. It has four species.- Species:* Warmingia buchtienii Schltr. ex Garay & Christenson...
Rchb.f.
Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach
Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach was an ornithologist, botanist and the foremost German orchidologist of the 19th century...
and dozens of vascular plant species (http://www.ipni.org/ipni/advPlantNameSearch.do?find_family=&find_genus=&find_species=warming*&find_infrafamily=&find_infragenus=&find_infraspecies=&find_authorAbbrev=&find_includePublicationAuthors=on&find_includePublicationAuthors=off&find_includeBasionymAuthors=on&find_includeBasionymAuthors=off&find_publicationTitle=&find_isAPNIRecord=on&find_isAPNIRecord=false&find_isGCIRecord=on&find_isGCIRecord=false&find_isIKRecord=on&find_isIKRecord=false&find_rankToReturn=all&output_format=normal&find_sortByFamily=on&find_sortByFamily=off&query_type=by_query&back_page=plantsearchIPNI]) has been named to his honour. The same is the case for a number of fungi, e.g. the smut fungus
Ustilaginales
The Ustilaginales are an order of fungi within the class Ustilaginomycetes. The order contains 8 families, 49 genera, and 851 species.Ustinaginales is also known and classified as the "smut fungi"...
Microbotryum warmingii (Rostr.
Emil Rostrup
Frederik Georg Emil Rostrup was a Danish botanist, mycologist and plant pathologist.From 1858, Emil Rostrup was a teacher at the paedagogical college Skårup Seminarium in then new subject natural history. He educated to-be school teachers for 25 years...
) Vánky and the gall fungus
Exobasidium
Exobasidium is a genus of fungi in the Exobasidiaceae family. The genus has a widespread distribution, especially in northern temperate regions, and contains about 50 species. Many of the species in this genus are plant pathogens that grow on Ericaceae....
Arcticomyces warmingii (Rostr.
Emil Rostrup
Frederik Georg Emil Rostrup was a Danish botanist, mycologist and plant pathologist.From 1858, Emil Rostrup was a teacher at the paedagogical college Skårup Seminarium in then new subject natural history. He educated to-be school teachers for 25 years...
) Savile
Douglas Barton Osborne Savile
Douglas Barton Osborne Savile was an Irish-born Canadian mycologist, plant pathologist and evolutionary biologist. He is particularly renowned for his unique work on the coevolution of host plants and their rust fungi....
. Warming Land
Warming Land
Warming Land is a peninsula in northern Greenland, bounded by St George Fjord and Sherard Osborn Fjord. It was named after the botanist and ecologist Eugen Warming....
- a peninsula
Peninsula
A peninsula is a piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland. In many Germanic and Celtic languages and also in Baltic, Slavic and Hungarian, peninsulas are called "half-islands"....
in northernmost Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...
is named for him.
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais is a federal university located in Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The students are admitted through yearly exams called vestibular....
has organized a series of 'Eugen Warming lectures in Evolutionary Ecology' since 1994.
Biographies and obituaries
- Raunkiær, C.Christen C. RaunkiærChristen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's...
(1904) Biography in Dansk Biografisk Lexikon, vol. XVIII - Urban, IgnatiusIgnatz UrbanIgnatz Urban was a German botanist. He is known for his contributions to the flora of the Caribbean and Brazil, and for his work as curator of the Berlin Botanical Garden. Born the son of a brewer, Urban showed an interest in botany as an undergraduate...
(1906) http://www.botanicus.org/page/309675Vitae for Warming in Flora Brasiliensis, enumeratio plantarum in Brasilia hactenus detectarum :quas suis aliorumque botanicorum studiis descriptas et methodo naturali digestas partim icone illustratas /ediderunt Carolus Fridericus Philippus de Martius et Augustus Guilielmus Eichler ; iisque defunctis successor Ignatius Urban; Fasc. CXXX (ultimus) - VITAE ITINERAQUE COLLECTORUM BOTANICORUM Etc.] - Obituary in NatureNature (journal)Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, 113, 683-684 (1924) by William G. Smith - Obituaries in Botanisk TidsskriftBotanisk TidsskriftBotanisk Tidsskrift was a Danish mixed scientific and amateur journal concerning botany, issued in Copenhagen by the Danish Botanical Society...
, 39 (1924):- L. K. RosenvingeLauritz Kolderup RosenvingeJanus Lauritz Andreas Kolderup Rosenvinge was a Danish botanist and phycologist. He took his Ph.D. 1888 from the University of Copenhagen. He was docent of botany at the polytechnic from 1900, and extraordinary professor of botany the University of Copenhagen with focus on spore plants from 1916...
: Eug. Warming og Dansk Botanisk Forening, pp. 1–6 - Carl ChristensenCarl ChristensenCarl Frederik Albert Christensen was a Danish systematic botanist. He graduated in natural history from the University of Copenhagen under professor Eugenius Warming. He was first school teacher in Copenhagen, later superintendent at the Botanical Museum. He was a specialist in ferns and published...
: Eug. Warming, en Levnedsbeskrivelse, pp. 7–30 - C. H. OstenfeldCarl Hansen OstenfeldCarl Emil Hansen Ostenfeld was a Danish systematic botanist. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen under professor Eugenius Warming. He was a keeper at the Botanical Museum 1900-1918, when he became professor of botany at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College...
: Warmings almindelige botaniske Virksomhed, pp. 31–38 - A. MentzAugust MentzAugust Mentz was a Danish botanist, peat extraction and moor reclamation expert and a pioneer in nature conservation....
: Warming som plantegeografisk Forsker, pp. 39–44 - Charles FlahaultCharles FlahaultCharles Henri Marie Flahault was a French botanist, among the early pioneers of phytogeography, phytosociology and forest ecology...
, O. Juel, C. Schröter and A.G. TansleyArthur TansleySir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. He obtained his degree in Biological Science in 1896, with specialization in botany and zoology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed...
: Eug. Warming in memoriam, pp. 45–56.
- L. K. Rosenvinge
- Christensen, C.Carl ChristensenCarl Frederik Albert Christensen was a Danish systematic botanist. He graduated in natural history from the University of Copenhagen under professor Eugenius Warming. He was first school teacher in Copenhagen, later superintendent at the Botanical Museum. He was a specialist in ferns and published...
(1924–26) Den danske botaniks historie, med tilhørende bibliografi. I. Den danske botaniks historie fra de ældste tider til 1912. II. Bibliografi. - Christensen, C.Carl ChristensenCarl Frederik Albert Christensen was a Danish systematic botanist. He graduated in natural history from the University of Copenhagen under professor Eugenius Warming. He was first school teacher in Copenhagen, later superintendent at the Botanical Museum. He was a specialist in ferns and published...
(1932) Eugenius Warming, pp. 156–160 in: Meisen, V. Prominent Danish Scientists through the Ages. University Library of Copenhagen 450th Anniversary. Levin & Munksgaard, Copenhagen. - Müller, D. (1980) Warming, Johannes Eugenius Bülow. In: Gillespie, C.G. (ed.) Dictionary of Scientific BiographyDictionary of Scientific BiographyThe Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly reference work that was published from 1970 through 1980. It is supplemented by the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography and an electronic version that includes both publications....
, vol. 16. New York, NY: Charles Scribner and Sons. ISBN 0-684-10114-9 - Klein, Aldo Luiz (2000) Warming e o cerrado brasileiro um século depois. São Paulo, UNESP. 156 pp. ISBN 85-7139-354-0
External links
- commons:Eugen Warming, Wikimedia Commons: "Om Skudbygning, Overvintring og Foryngelse"
- Biographical sketch
- Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Warming