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Frederic Clements was a founding figure in ecology, whose theory of plant succession helped consolidate the discipline in the early 20th century and continues to influence both scholarly and lay thinking about vegetation dynamics to this day.

Born in 1874 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Clements studied under Charles E. Bessey at the University of Nebraska, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1894 and a doctorate in 1898. Surrounded by the rapid conversion of prairie to farmland, he conducted exhaustive inquiries into native grasses in the Great Plains, pioneering the use of the quadrat as a method of quantitative measurement of vegetation. His Phytogeography of Nebraska (1898, coauthored with Roscoe Pound), Development and Structure of Vegetation (1904), Research Methods in Ecology (1905), and Plant Physiology and Ecology (1907) established him as a leading figure in the nascent field of ecology, and in 1907 he accepted the post of Professor and Head of the Department of Botany at the University of Minnesota.

Clements expanded his fieldwork to the entire western United States, and in 1916 he completed his magnum opus, Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation. The publisher, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, hired him away from Minnesota the following year and employed him until his retirement in 1941. Throughout his Carnegie career he worked summers at the Alpine Laboratory below Pike’s Peak in Colorado; he spent winters at the Desert Laboratory in Tucson until 1925 and subsequently at a coastal ecology laboratory he established in Santa Barbara, California.

The central idea of Clements’ theory was that units of vegetation he termed formations are “complex organisms” with determinate life histories. Each formation passes through a fixed sequence of “seres,” or seral stages-e.g., lichens, annual grasses, perennial grasses, and trees-on the way to climax, at which point equilibrium is obtained between the vegetation, soil, and climate. Succession was the process by which formations developed through their stages. Plant Succession opened with the claim that this theory was “of universal application” and that it “represents the only complete and adequate view of vegetation.” Four years later Clements published Plant Indicators, a companion volume on how to apply the theory to practical matters of agriculture and range management. Both books contained descriptions of the formations of western North America.

Upon Clements’ death in 1945, A.G. Tansley wrote presciently that a theory “may be overstated, it may contain flaws which make it unacceptable in its entirety; but if it also contains, as Clements’s did, a general idea of the first importance on which subsequent advance can be based, its originator’s name can never be forgotten.” During his lifetime, Clements’s ontological claim for formations as organisms was strongly disputed, most scathingly by Henry Gleason in a 1926 journal article, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association.”

The field of range science, heavily indebted to succession, has struggled mightily to find an alternate theoretical paradigm; and in recent decades Clementsianism has become almost synonymous with equilibrium ecology, now deemed anachronistic or at least inapplicable in many contexts. Yet it seems plant ecology cannot but rely on something like successional theory to organize its myriad observations of vegetation change.

Bibliography:

Frederic Clements, Plant Succession and Indicators: A Definitive Edition of Plant Succession and Plant Indicators (Hafner Press, 1973);
William Cooper, “Sir Arthur Tansley and the Science of Ecology,” Ecology (Vol 38, No. 4, 1957);
Henry A. Gleason, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club (53: 7-26, 1926).