Clements, Frederic Edward

(b. Lincoln, Nebraska, 16 September 1874; d. Santa Barbara, California, 26 July 1945),

botany.

Clements was the most influential ecologist of the first half of the twentieth century; protagonist of “plant succession” and its component concepts of formation and climax; glossarist (he introduced “sere,” “ecad,” etc.); and adviser to the U. S. government on policies of range management, forestry, and Dust Bowl rehabilitation. He was wholly a product of the Great Plains by birth, education, and outlook. A protégé of C. E. Bessey and a classmate of Roscoe Pound at the University of Nebraska, Clements gave direction in the United States to emergent plant ecology launched by Warming and others abroad.

Clements’ father, Ephraim George Clements, was a photographer who had served in the Civil War with the New York Infantry; his mother was Mary Angeline Scoggin. At nineteen Clements published his first paper, which described new species of fungi. The following year he received his B. S. degree at the University of Nebraska and was appointed an assistant in botany. He participated in the phytogeographic survey of Nebraska, the findings of which were published in 1898 in collaboration with Roscoe Pound. Clements quickly rose in the academic ranks—instructor in 1897 and adjunct professor in 1899 following the award of his Ph.D. in 1898—to become professor of plant physiology in 1906. Edith Gertrude Schwartz, who took a Ph.D. in botany at Nebraska as Clements’ student, wrote in 1961 that they had dreamed of an “alpine laboratory” in the summer of 1899 on their honeymoon visit to Colorado (they had been married on 30 May in Lincoln). The purchase of the cabin site in Engelmann Canyon on Pikes Peak, made with income from the sale to museums of Colorado exsiccatae collected during the following three summers, led to the establishment of the laboratory there.

In 1907 Clements became head of the botany department at the University of Minnesota, remaining there ten years. He left the university to become a full-time research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, spending winters at experimental gardens in Tucson, Arizona, and then Santa Barbara, California, and summers at Alpine Laboratory, where he directed a staff of nine permanent and seasonal (usually student) assistants. Scientists came to observe what he liked to distinguish as “dynamic ecology.” The Clementses spent the summer of 1911 in Europe examining Gaston Bonnier’s transplant program and the alpine flora. In 1913 they played a prominent part in the International Phytogeographic Excursion.

Clements’ Plant Succession (1916) is generally considered by ecologists to be his greatest work. It was based on his Development and Structure of Vegetation (1904). Shantz (1945) considered Clements botanically to be “essentially a philosopher” and his “analysis and synthesis” to be his greatest contribution. From his earliest fieldwork Clements espoused a conservative, inclusive interpretation of plant species and sought to demonstrate experimentally that some species might be transformed under the impact of environment. Using grasses and native caespitose perennials, he divided and transplanted them to contrasting habitats at different elevations, from the plains at 5,500 feet to the summit of Pikes Peak, 14,110 feet. He insisted that he had “converted” alpine timothy into a lowland timothy. His neo-Lamarckian views, minimizing the role of chromosomes, challenged cytogeneticists; and his findings, not substantiated today in the way he promulgated, stimulated the “new systematics.”

Clements’ Genera of Fungi (1909, rev. with C. L. Shear in 1931) was a landmark in mycology. Popular identification manuals on Rocky Mountain and Sierra wild flowers, illustrated with original paintings by his wife, were first published in the National Geographic Magazine and were reprinted by demand. These works disseminated Bessey’s phylogenetic views.

It was characteristic of Clements to outfit himself as nattily for the field as for addressing a banquet of the Soil Conservation Service. He spoke porecisely, affecting classic Latin pronunciation for plant genera. Although he relished debate, he was reasonable in argument. He was kind and considerate; esteem came more easily to him than comradeship. Success through the years gave him a confidence that bordered on arrogance. Above all there persisted his sharp intellect and capacity for unremitting work.

Inseparably associated with her husband (the story of her typing reports as he drove the automobile while dictating his observations is not apocryphal), Edith Clements organized his reliquiae and published summaries of their work after his death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Among his publications are Development and Structure of Vegetation (Lincoln, Nebr., 1904); Research Methods in Ecology (Lincoln, Nebr., 1905); Minnesota Mushrooms (Minneapolis, Minn.,1910); plant Succession (Washington, D.C., 1916); Plant Indicators (Washington, D.C., 1920); and Climatic cycles and Human Populations on the Great Plains (Washington, D.C., 1938).

Collaborations include Experimental Pollination (Washington, D.C., 1923), written with Frances L. Long; Phylogenetic Method in Taxonomy. The North American Species of Artemisia, Chrysothamnus, and Atriplex (Washington, D.C.,1923), written with H.M. Hall; Flower Families and Ancestors (New York, 1928), written with Edith Clements; Plant Ecology (New York, 1929), written with J. E. Weaver; and Bio-ecology (New York, 1939), written with Victor Shelford. Additional titles are listed in the National Cyclopedia article (below).

The Clements papers, photographs, field books, and memorabilia are preserved in the Department of Archives, University of Wyoming, in 154 document boxes.

II. Secondary Literature. An encomium by Edith Clements appeared in National Cyclopedia of American Biography34 (1948), 266–267; she also wrote an anecdotal biography, in Adventures in Ecology (New York, 1960), passim; and an article on Alpine Laboratory, in Nebraska Alumnus57 , no.6 (1961), 12–16. Biographical sketches by others include Joseph Ewan, in LeRoy Hafen, Colorado and Its people II (New York, 1948), 24; Joseph Ewan, Rocky Mountain Naturalists (Denver, 1950), pp. 183–184; H. L. Shantz, in Ecology26 (1945), 317–319; and A. G. Tansley, in Journal of Ecology34 (1947), 194–196, excellent and balanced.

Joseph Ewan