Frank Edwin Egler (April 26, 1911 – December 26, 1996) was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of vegetation science.
[1] He went on to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse, to pursue a career in landscape engineering, but switched to plant ecology and the University of Chicago, graduating in 1932.
His outspokenness on the over-use of herbicides in rights-of-way led to his being asked to resign that position just before the museum's Department of Conservation and General Ecology was disbanded.
His 1947 study of Hawaiian vegetation is one of three papers credited with helping to finally bring down the Clementsian paradigm that so dominated American ecology to that time (McIntosh, p. 134; Simberloff, p 16).
[5][6] Egler's entertainingly written 1951 "Commentary" on American plant ecology anticipated some of the ideas of science historian and philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn.
Along with his numerous descriptive studies of vegetation, his work with herbicides helped Egler demonstrate that succession did not always go through the regular stages that Frederic E. Clements had proposed, but was as often determined by the composition of seeds present after a disturbance.
When Rachel Carson approached him for help with Silent Spring, however, he had essentially abandoned those efforts in frustration and was no longer calling himself an ecologist.
A consequence was that a passage in Silent Spring having some of Egler's sarcasm received the most criticism from Ian Baldwin in his famously negative review in Science.
Some of his works were written under the anagrammatic pseudonyms of Warren G. Kenfield (Frank Edwin Egler) and Stan R. Foote (Aton Forest).
Egler's summer home in northern Connecticut has been preserved as a museum and Research Natural Area, and as a tribute to his life and work.