John Cairns is a pioneer in the field of environmental pollution, community ecology, and recovery and restoration of damaged ecosystems. His research is aimed at improving the quality of information used in making environmental decisions. In addition to studying the effects of pollution on ecosystems (a field now called ecotoxicology), Cairns has spent a majority of his career researching methods to heal stressed ecosystems, a field known as restoration ecology. He has also studied the ways in which freshwater microbial communities, particularly protists and protozoans, are structured and transported, and their successional processes, that is, how they develop and change. In the early 1970s, using information he learned through these studies, he developed a method to measure the effects of pollution in temperate zone aquatic ecosystems. This is the chief method used for fresh-water pollution studies in the People's Republic of China.

Cairns' career work has allowed important...