Eugenius Warming

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Eugenius Warming.
Eugenius Warming.

Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (November 3, 1841 Mandø – 1924 Copenhagen), was a Danish botanist, professor at the University of Copenhagen, director of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden from 1885 to 1911 and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Warming established plant ecology as a primary division of botany.

When he was 21 years old, he travelled to Brazil to work as personal secretary for the Danish palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund. He lived for two years in Brazil. This experience, that would be decisive for his future work, opened his eyes for the rich vegetation of the country and its relationship with the environment.

Back to Europe, he didn't find a teaching job in Denmark and went to Sweden, where he teached at the University of Stockholm for several years. Back to Copenhagen in 1895, he divided plants into four groups, viz., hydrophytes, mesophytes, xerophytes, and halophytes. In that same year, he wrote Plantesamfund which was later revised and translated into English in 1909 as The Oecology of Plants: an Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities.

  • Hydrophyte - An aquatic plant; a plant which lives and grows in water.
  • Mesophyte - A name given to plants which grow naturally in conditions of intermediate soil moisture.
  • Xerophyte - A plant that is able to grow where the water supply is small. Xerophytes are plants that are able to control the loss of water from their aërial parts. Xerophytes employ many different tools to control the loss of water, such as; waxy deposits, varnish, or mineral crusts on the epidermis; reduction of air spaces; storage organs; thick-walled epidermis; and cork in woody plants. Some xerophytes are annual plants that grow quickly during the rainy season.
  • Halophyte - A plant which grows in salt-impregnated soils.

Warming's work focused on the habitats of plant communities and the factors that contributed to their growth, including aspects like light, heat, soil, humidity and interactions with adjacent animals. His work primarily addresses the emerging idea of a communal existence of organisms as an "ecology" and the adjustment of organisms to a habitat, which he termed "epharmosis."

The standard botanical author abbreviation Warm. is applied to species he described.

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