A Danish botanist wrote the first plant ecology textbook, then got plagiarised
In 1895 Eugen Warming published Plantesamfund, often called the first textbook of plant ecology, and asked a new question: why do unrelated plants in distant places solve drought, cold or salt the same way? Three years later a German rival borrowed his research and figures wholesale without proper credit.
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming was born on 3 November 1841 on Mandø, a small island in the Wadden Sea, the only child of a parish minister who died young. He grew up with his mother's family in Vejle. In 1859 he began natural history at the University of Copenhagen but broke off for three and a half years, from 1863 to 1866, to serve as secretary to the palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund at Lagoa Santa in Brazil. After further study in Munich and Bonn, he earned his doctorate in Copenhagen in 1871.
His career began with a snub. When Copenhagen's botany chair fell vacant, it went to the older and far less productive Ferdinand Didrichsen. Warming taught as a docent instead, then became professor at Stockholm from 1882 to 1885, where he was elected rector. In 1885 he returned to a Copenhagen professorship and the directorship of its botanical garden. His expeditions ranged from Greenland in 1884 to Venezuela and Trinidad in 1891 and 1892.
Plantesamfund grew out of his lectures on plant geography and surveyed the world's major biomes. Its lasting contribution was functional: it explained plant communities by how they cope with environmental problems, rather than simply cataloguing which species grow where. A German translation followed in 1896 and an English edition, Oecology of Plants, in 1909. In 1902 Paul Graebner reissued the German version with his own name added though he had changed nothing. The ecologist A. F. W. Schimper's 1898 book leaned heavily on more than 15 of Warming's works, even reproducing his figures, without acknowledging the debt.
In 1975 Robert J. Goodland argued that if one person deserved to be honoured as ecology's founder, it should be Warming. He married Hanne Jespersen in 1871, and they had eight children. He died on 2 April 1924.
Source: Eugenius Warming
