Clements, Frederic Edward

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Clements, Frederic Edward (1874–1945) An American botanist and ecologist whose Research Methods in Ecology (1905) was the first work to deal fully with field experiments. Clements maintained that a plant community develops by constant adjustments of the relationships among species (i.e. a succession) to an optimal state, the climax community, and that a plant community may in some sense by regarded as a superorganism. See also TANSLEY, ARTHUR GEORGE.

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