Peter Greig-Smith
Greig-Smith went to school in Birmingham, United Kingdom, before going to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was inspired by the teachings of Alexander S. Watt, the first British botanist to seriously study the phenomenon of pattern and scaling in plant communities from a quantitative perspective.
[5][6][7] In 1950, he published a synthesis paper on the taxonomy and biogeography of liverworts,[8] as an early attempt to shed some light on the question of the effects of Quaternary glaciations on the history of the British flora.
[10] Greig-Smith also wrote a synthesis of the natural history of nettles of the United Kingdom with a detailed analysis of the plant communities where they prospered.
Encouraged by E. Ashby, an early pioneer of quantitative methods who was then professor of botany at Manchester, he left the university for six months to study secondary succession in Trinidad, in collaboration with colleagues of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture on the island.
In order to try to unravel and explain this complexity, he developed novel statistical methods to test hypotheses on the association between species and the spatial pattern of saplings and adult trees in the field.
[13][14] The first study included a number of techniques that at that time were novel in vegetation analysis, such as the species-area plots developed by Ronald A. Fisher and Henry Gleason, size-specific survivorship, and quantitative floristic tables.
In the second Trinidad paper, he also used nested analyses of variance (ANOVAs), comparisons with the Poisson distribution, and variance-to-mean ratios to test and understand spatial patterns in the trees of the secondary forest.
The place was a haven for academic exchange: Laszlo Orlóci, a Professor of Ecology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada,[15] recalls in his biographical memories[16] that during 1964 alone, Greig-Smith's lab at Bangor received the visit of Robert Sokal and Peter Sneath, founders of the discipline of numerical taxonomy, and David Goodall, William T. Williams, and Mike Dale, who were creating initial content for a solid school of statistical ecology in Australia.
After this initial study, the spatial pattern of dunes and grasslands became a lifelong interest in his ecological research, published in a number of papers with collaborators and students.
After his visit to Trinidad as a young researcher, he developed an interest for African savannas, on the possibility of using his methodology for pattern analysis to understand the importance of intraspecific competition in tropical, strongly rainfall-seasonal ecosystems.
Greig-Smith saw in multivariate methods an opportunity to analyze and understand the complex floristic composition of tropical forests, which had fascinated him since his visit to Trinidad in 1948.
In 1963, he applied for a grant to investigate the use of quantitative methods to establish whether the highly diverse tropical rainforests showed any organized pattern, particularly in relation to environment, an open question at the time.
Three seminal papers were published as a result of their collaboration, highlighting the potential of multivariate methods to analyze floristic patterns in complex, multispecies communities.
[35][36][37][38][39][40] Having laid the foundations of the discipline of multivariate methods, as a committed naturalist and field biologist Greig-Smith never took much interest in abstruse theoretical discussions, always expressing his concern about the risk of becoming too engaged with theoretical refinements of methodology and repeatedly stating his belief that numerical methods are worth developing only if they are to be used on real data in attempts to answer real questions with relevance in the field.
Roy Turkington[52] recalls that Harper strongly favored the power of simple, direct experiments and distrusted complex multivariate methods, often arguing that ordination methods were “a formalized description of consequences.” “Nowhere is this holism more apparent than in the way ecology is taught in many schools and universities with its emphasis on complex systems and the ways in which they can be described,” wrote Harper in “After Description”,[53] and he immediately added: “There is probably no other science in which students are taught by being dropped into the deep end of complexity.” The contrast between experimental ecology in simplified systems, with only one or a few species, against large-scale pattern-seeking methods led Peter Greig-Smith and John Harper into frequent discussions in the form of good-humored debates following departmental seminars in Bangor, which, as amusingly evoked in Hill (2003)[54] and Matlack (2009),[55] were conducted amid legendary clouds of pipe smoke for the benefit of the students, who could see firsthand how academic arguments conducted both with rigor and humor can be very stimulating and deeply entertaining.
In Bangor, Greig-Smith took the view that it was up to his students and young postdocs to define the project, develop the scientific hypotheses, and do the work, provided that they included quantitative ecology, his own area of expertise, in their graduate research.
In his presidential viewpoint address in the Bulletin of the British Ecological Society, he advised younger ecologists not to become too specialized: “Insight so often comes from initially unconsidered information and ideas,” he wrote, urging colleagues to maintain a broad curiosity for the natural world[68]
