Tansley's ecosystem concept

In 1935 the English botanist Arthur Tansley introduced the word ecosystem in an article in the journal Ecology titled The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms. He argued that ecologists should treat organisms and their physical environment, including soil, water and climate, as a single system, because they constantly exchange matter and energy. The word itself was suggested to him by a younger colleague, Arthur Roy Clapham. Tansley was reacting against the American ecologist Frederic Clements, who described a plant community as a kind of superorganism that develops through fixed stages to a climax, and against holistic ideas of a similar kind.¹²

The roots lay in Humboldt's picture of nature as a web linking plants, climate and altitude, and in Darwin's entangled bank of competing and cooperating species. Tansley kept the interdependence but rejected the organism metaphor, treating the system as a set of interacting parts that can be measured. In 1942 Raymond Lindeman did so in a study of Cedar Bog Lake in Minnesota, following energy through food chains, and Eugene and Howard Odum made ecosystems the center of their 1953 textbook. Tansley also helped found the Nature Conservancy in Britain in 1949, serving as its first chairman, and the idea became basic to environmental science and conservation.¹³