Biomes and Zonobiomes

Abstract

The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s disciple, in 1866. But, as Haeckel conceded, the concept of ecology is at least a century older. Notions of the “plenitude of Nature”, food chains, and equilibrium of numbers were first grappled with by some of the most celebrated natural historians of the eighteenth century, such as Carl Linneaus, as well as by men no less great but not so well known in their day, such as Gilbert White of Selbourne (Worster 1985). During the nineteenth century, ecological ideas were developed by, among others, Alexander von Humboldt, Edward Forbes, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Charles Robert Darwin. It was not until the twentieth century that ecological thought had a profound impact on science thanks to the pioneering endeavours of men such as Eugenius Warming, a Dutch plant geographer, Frederic Clements, a Nebraskan plant ecologist, and Charles Christopher Adams, whose work was mentioned in the previous chapter. Warming’s treatise Plantesamfund: Grundtraek of den Økologiske Plantegeografi (1895), which was rendered into English as Oecology of Plants: an Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities (1909), made three chief points: firstly, that plants make structural and physiological adjustments to the state of habitat in which they live — to light, heat, humidity, soil, terrain, and animals; secondly, that animals and plants are part of a community, an assemblage of species sharing similar environmental tolerances; and thirdly, that plant communities depend more on the water content of the soil than on temperature.

The flora and fauna of a district are determined mainly by the character of the climate, and not by the nature of the soil, or the conformation of the ground. It is from difference of climate that tropical life differs so much from arctic, and both of these from the life of temperate regions. It is climate, and climate alone, that causes the orange and the vine to blossom, and the olive to flourish, in the south, but denies them to the north, of Europe. It is climate, and climate alone, that enables the forest tree to grow on the plain, but not on the mountain top; that causes wheat and barley to flourish on the mainland of Scotland, but not on the steppes of Siberia.

James Croll (1875, p. 2)