John Thomas Curtis
Encyclopedia
John Thomas Curtis was an American
botanist
and plant ecologist
. He is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Together with J. Roger Bray, he developed the method of polar ordination (now known as Bray-Curtis ordination) with its inherent distance measure, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity
.
Curtis completed his Ph.D.
in botany
at the University of Wisconsin in 1937. He remained affiliated with that university for the remainder of his career, except through 1942-1945, when he served as research director of the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole. Both in 1942 and in 1956, he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
s. In 1951 he was made full professor of botany
at the University of Wisconsin.
The collective efforts of Curtis and the thirty-nine Ph.D. students that he managed to supervise during his relatively short career, resulted in the work ‘’’The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities, published 1959. This book remains one of the important contributions to the field of plant ecology during the twentieth century, and spawned the Wisconsin School of North American plant ecology.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
botanist
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...
and plant ecologist
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 is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Together with J. Roger Bray, he developed the method of polar ordination (now known as Bray-Curtis ordination) with its inherent distance measure, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity
Bray Curtis dissimilarity
In ecology and biology, the Bray–Curtis dissimilarity, named after J. Roger Bray and John T. Curtis, is a statistic used to quantify the compositional dissimilarity between two different sites. It is equivalent to the total number of species that are unique to any one of the two sites divided by...
.
Curtis completed his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in 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 Wisconsin in 1937. He remained affiliated with that university for the remainder of his career, except through 1942-1945, when he served as research director of the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole. Both in 1942 and in 1956, he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
s. In 1951 he was made full professor 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 Wisconsin.
The collective efforts of Curtis and the thirty-nine Ph.D. students that he managed to supervise during his relatively short career, resulted in the work ‘’’The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities, published 1959. This book remains one of the important contributions to the field of plant ecology during the twentieth century, and spawned the Wisconsin School of North American plant ecology.
Selected scientific works
- A study of relic Wisconsin prairies by the species-presence method (with H. C. Greene). EcologyEcology (journal)Ecology is a scientific journal publishing research and synthesis papers in the field of ecology. It was founded in 1920, and is published by the Ecological Society of America.- External links :**...
, 30 (1): 83-92. 1949. Full text - The interrelations of certain analytic and synthetic phytosociological characters (with Robert P. McIntosh). EcologyEcology (journal)Ecology is a scientific journal publishing research and synthesis papers in the field of ecology. It was founded in 1920, and is published by the Ecological Society of America.- External links :**...
, 31 (3): 434-455. 1950. Full text - An upland forest continuum in the prairie-forest border region of Wisconsin (with Robert P. McIntosh). EcologyEcology (journal)Ecology is a scientific journal publishing research and synthesis papers in the field of ecology. It was founded in 1920, and is published by the Ecological Society of America.- External links :**...
, 32 (3): 476-496. 1951. Full text - An ordination of the upland forest communities of Southern Wisconsin (with J. Roger Bray). Ecological Monographs 27 (4): 325-349. 1957. Full text
- The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 1959.