Leonty Grigoryevich Ramensky (; – January 27, 1953) was a plant

ecologist Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely re ...

who conceived several important ideas that were overlooked in the West and later ’re-invented’ by western scientists. He lived in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. He graduated from the

Petrograd University Saint Petersburg State University (SPBGU; ) is a public research university in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Russia. Founded in 1724 by a decree of Peter the Great, the university from the be ...

in 1916 and obtained a Ph.D. in biology in 1935. From 1911 to 1928 he worked in the Research Institute of the

Voronezh Voronezh ( ; , ) is a city and the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast in southwestern Russia straddling the Voronezh River, located from where it flows into the Don River. The city sits on the Southeastern Railway, which connects wes ...

Gouvernement (now

Voronezh State University Voronezh State University (, ВГУ; VSU) is one of the main universities in Central Russia, located in the city of Voronezh. The university was established in 1918 by professors evacuated from the University of Tartu in Estonia. The university ...

) and from 1928 in the State Grassland Institute (later All-union Scientific Research Institute of Forages dedicated to V.R.Williams). Ramensky was a proponent of the view that biotic communities consist of species behaving individualistically (much like

Henry Gleason Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975) was an American ecologist, botanist, and taxonomist. He was known for his endorsement of the individualistic or open community concept of ecological succession, and his opposition to Frederic Clements's concept ...

in the U.S.A.). This was in strong contrast to the prevailing view of communities as super-organisms, held by the powerful V.N.Sukachov and his consorts (much like

Frederic Clements Frederic Edward Clements (September 16, 1874 – July 26, 1945) was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of both plant ecology and vegetation succession. Biography Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, he studied botany at the University o ...

in the U.S.A.). Hence, Ramensky was marginalized within the Russian scientific community and was only posthumously rehabilitated by Russian ecologists. Much later, the significance of his ideas was discovered by ecologists in the West.

Selected scientific works

1. :* Translated to German and published 1930 as ''Zur Methodik der vergleichenden Bearbeitung und Ordnung von Pflanzenlisten und anderen Objekten, die durch mehrere verschiedenartig wirkende Faktoren bestimmt warden'' in:

Emil Abderhalden Emil Abderhalden (9 March 1877 – 5 August 1950) was a Swiss biochemist and physiologist. His main findings, though disputed already in the 1910s, were not finally rejected until the late 1990s. Whether his misleading findings were based on fra ...

's ''Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen'' (Breslau) 18: 269-304. In this work, Ramensky criticized the use of hierarchical classifications of plant communities and advocated ordination ("''Ordnung''") of communities (and other complex objects with multiple determining factors, such as soil profile and weather data) instead. He was explicit about assuming unimodal responses of species to underlying gradients in the environment. This was long before

Correspondence analysis Correspondence analysis (CA) is a multivariate statistical technique proposed by Herman Otto Hartley (Hirschfeld) and later developed by Jean-Paul Benzécri. It is conceptually similar to principal component analysis, but applies to categorical ...

was first used (1952), the now classic applications of ordination to plant communities by

J. Roger Bray John Roger Bray (June 20, 1929 – April 25, 2018) was an American-born ecologist known for his collaboration with John Thomas Curtis. The Bray–Curtis dissimilarity is jointly named after them. Bray was born in 1929 to Roger H. Bray, who develo ...

and John T. Curtis and David W. Goodall and the theoretical foundations of gradient analysis was developed by Whittaker and others (1970s onwards). 2. In this work, Ramensky proposed fundamental plant life strategies towards stress and disturbance. This work is a precursor of

Grime Grime may refer to: * Dirt, in the form of black, ingrained dust Music * Grime music, a genre of music * ''Grime'' (album), a 2001 album by Iniquity * "Grime", a 2023 song by Macklemore from ''Ben'' * "Grime", a 2024 song by Kittie from ''Fire ...

's CSR strategy scheme. 3. In this work, Ramensky and colleagues listed some 1,400 plant species from

European Russia European Russia is the western and most populated part of the Russia, Russian Federation. It is geographically situated in Europe, as opposed to the country's sparsely populated and vastly larger eastern part, Siberia, which is situated in Asia ...

with tabulated quantitative indicator values for their tolerances for soil moisture, nutrients, grazing etc. This work is a precursor of Ellenberg’s widespread indicator values. 4. This volume contains collected works of Ramensky.

References

* Rabotnov, T.A. (1953) L.G. Ramenskii (obituary in Russian). Botaničeskii Žurnal 38 (5).
Ponyatovskaya, V.M. (1959) On two trends in phytocoenology (in Russian). Botaničeskii Žurnal 44(3): 402-407. Translated and annotated by Jack Major in ''Vegetatio'' 10(5): 373-385

Major, J. (1962) Autecological evaluation of Russian plants. Ecology 43(1): 177-179
* Grime, J.P., Hodgson, J.G. and Hunt, R. (2007) Comparative Plant Ecology: A Functional Approach to common British Species, 2nd edn. Castlepoint Press, 752 p. Panel: The research contribution of L.G. Ramenskii (p. 5).

External links

Biography in Russian
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ramensky, L.G. Ecologists from the Russian Empire Soviet inventors Science writers from the Russian Empire 1884 births 1953 deaths Plant ecologists Soviet botanists Soviet ecologists