Arthur G. Tansley was a highly influential British botanist and ecologist. He was educated at University College, London, and Trinity College of Cambridge University. He taught at University College until 1906, and then moved to Cambridge. In 1927, He became a Professor of Botany at Oxford, and he retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1937. Much of his retirement was spent working for the conservation of nature in Britain, largely by public advocacy and by working with the Nature Conservancy, of which he was the first Chairman.

In 1902, Tansley founded the influential botanical journal, New Phytologist, and was its editor for thirty years. He was a founder of the British Ecological Society in 1913, and was the editor of its key periodical, the Journal of Ecology, for twenty years. Tansley's classic book, The British Islands and Their Vegetation, was published in 1939.

Tansley...