Andrew Delmar Hopkins
Andrew Delmar Hopkins (August 20, 1857 – September 22, 1948) was an American entomologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He became a specialist in the bark beetle family Scolytidae, especially the genus Dendroctonus, species of which are the most destructive insects in coniferous forests of North America.
Yet even though Hopkins was seminal in developing the scope of forest entomology in North America, his only formal education was in the county schools of West Virginia.
His work organizing one of the first farm cooperatives during that period brought him to the attention of the West Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station.
The State was looking for an entomologist and Hopkins volunteered, making it clear that the pay was not important to him, and asking only that he be allowed to work from his home.
To alleviate the Station's concern that he wasn't professionally trained, he sent the director the manuscript he'd written about a local agricultural pest complete with his original drawings.
On one of those trips, he and a co-worker discovered a major bark beetle outbreak in the eastern highlands, on Cheat Mountain.
By 1904 after his return, he rose to become head of the newly formed Division of Forest Insects (Bureau of Entomology) in Washington D.C. Hopkins retired in 1923, and he returned home to his farm in Wood County, West Virginia, where he'd started his career He continued developing his ideas on bioclimatics, and the Department of Agriculture established a field station which was given the title "the Kanawha Farms Intercontinental Base Station for Bioclimatic Research."
Hopkins described bioclimatics as the attempt to correlate phenological phenomena of plants and animals with the various elements which make up the climate of the region.
Although he has written dozens of well renowned publications, Hopkins most popular on bark beetles include the “Catalog of West Virginia Scolytidae (Bark Beetles) and Their Enemies" and "Catalog of West Virginia Forest and Shade Tree Insects."
