J. Philip Grime

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John Philip Grime is a prominent British ecologist and emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield^[1]. He is best known for his CSR theory on plant strategies, for the unimodal relationship between species richness and site productivity (the "humped-back model"), for the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, and for the DST classification (dominants, satellites and transients).

Grime's 1979 book Plant Strategies and Vegetation Processes has been cited more than 1,200 times. Together with many influential scientific papers, it has made him a highly cited scientist. In an interview Grime has stated that "Ecology lacks a Periodic Table", quoting Richard Southwood ^[2].

Contents 1 Career 2 Honours 3 Selected works 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Career

He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Sheffield in 1960 and joined the staff of the Department of Botany in 1961. He worked at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, U.S.A. from 1963 to 1964. He then reruned to the University of Sheffield and joined the Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology, which had been founded in 1961 by professor Ian H. Rorison. Grime served as deputy director of the unit 1964-1989 and as director from 1989.

[edit] Honours

In 1997, he won the Marsh Ecology Award from the British Ecological Society and was awarded honourary membership of the Ecological Society of America. He was also Distinguished Visiting Ecologist at Pennsylvania State University in that year. In 1998, he became elected Fellow of the Royal Society and honourary doctor at University of Nijmegen. He has been honorary member of the British Ecological Society since 1999.

[edit] Selected works

• Vegetation classification by reference to strategies. Nature (1974) 250: 26-31.
• Evidence for the existence of three primary strategies in plants and its relevance to ecological and evolutionary theory. American Naturalist (1977) 111: 1169-1194.
• Plant Strategies and Vegetation Processes. Wiley. (1979) ISBN 0-471-99692-0
• Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes, and Ecosystem Properties. (2nd much expanded edition of the above) Wiley (2001) ISBN 0-471-49601-4
• Benefits of plant diversity to ecosystems: immediate, filter and founder effects. Journal of Ecology (1998) 86: 902-910.
• Trait convergence and trait divergence in herbaceous plant communities: mechanisms and consequences. Journal of Vegetation Science (2006) 17: 255-260.
• Plant strategy theories: a comment on Craine (2005). Journal of Ecology, 95, 227-230.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• University of Sheffield - staff biographical page for Grime
• ScienceWatch - "University of Sheffield's Philip Grime: Strategic Advances in Plant Ecology" (interview)