Charles Sutherland Elton

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Charles Sutherland Elton (born March 29, 1900 in Manchester , † May 1, 1991 in Oxford ) was a British ecologist and zoologist . The beginning of modern animal ecology is attributed to him.

Life

He was the third son of the literary scholar Oliver Elton (1861-1945) and his wife Lettia Maynard Elton (1865-1927). In 1901 the family moved to Liverpool , where Oliver Elton had been appointed professor. Charles Elton received his education at Liverpool College and Oxford University , where he graduated in zoology in 1922. In 1921 he had at the of George Binney organized and (1900-1972) by Francis Charles Robert Jourdain led Spitsbergen participated expedition of the University of Oxford. He was also involved in the two follow-up expeditions, the Merton College Arctic Expedition in 1923 and the Oxford University Arctic Expedition in 1924, which took him back to Svalbard.

Elton's entire academic career took place at Oxford University. In 1923 he was hired as a demonstrator. In 1932, two years after his fourth Arctic expedition to Lapland , he founded the Bureau of Animal Population and the Journal of Animal Ecology . In 1936 he became a reader in animal ecology .

Elton was married to the poet Edith Joy Scovell (1907-1999) since 1937 . The couple had a son and a daughter.

power

Charles Elton was among the first to study the relationship between animals and plants in their natural environment and to define animal behavior as a result of the living environment. He introduced the concept of the food chain and is one of the early environmentalists and invasion biologists , as he dealt intensively with the impact of introduced species on a habitat. Together with the American Aldo Leopold , he coined the term ecosystems . He introduced the concept of ecological niche . The ecologist Joseph Grinnell had previously described the concept, but Elton's work was independent of it.

One of the research projects is a study lasting over 20 years on the interaction of individual animal species in wetlands , bodies of water and trees in an area near Oxford . The Eltonian pyramid of numbers goes back to him, which deals with the question of why the number of predators across the food chain is decreasing.

Honors

Elton was elected in 1953 as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1970 awarded him the Darwin Medal . In 1967 he was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London . In 1968 he was made an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

  • Animal Ecology , New York, The Macmillan Company, 1927 [1]
  • Voles, mice and lemmings , Oxford 1942
  • Competition and the structure of ecological communities in Journal of Animal Ecology 15 (1): pp. 54-68, 1946 online
  • The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants - 1958
  • The Pattern of Animal Communities - 1966

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Mole: Obituary: EJ Scovell , In: Independent , November 12, 1999 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Elton, Charles Sutherland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Elton, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British ecologist and zoologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1991
Place of death Oxford