Ecological Society of America Cooper Award Received

The 2009 Cooper Award from the Ecological Society of America was received for the paper: Jenkins, Jerry, Motzkin, Glenn, and Ward, Kirsten. 2008. The Harvard Forest Flora: An Inventory, Analysis, and Ecological History (note: this download is very large). Harvard Forest, Harvard University, Petersham, Massachusetts. Harvard Forest Paper No. 28. The William Skinner Cooper Award is given to honor an outstanding contributor to the fields of geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of plants along environmental gradients.

The nominating committee wrote: "The Harvard Forest Flora is a resurvey of a central New England woodland, following on 100 years of botanical work, including several complete surveys dating back to 1911. Consistent with the work of W.S. Cooper, the study documents the community impacts of centennial-scale environmental change and places this local change in the context of a regional environmental gradient. The work is exceptional in its power communicate ideas central to our discipline with clarity and simple elegance. A significant contribution of this work is its careful articulation of how the nuances of species identity represent the biotic processes we seek to understand in assessments of biodiversity. In clear prose and with simple elegant figures, descriptions in The Flora of biological variation within species and in species diversity over space create a convincing picture of how the biodiversity of a typical place has weathered the many changes of the 20th century."