Alexander Stuart Watt

Alexander Stuart Watt FRS

Life Watt was born on an Aberdeenshire farm and went to school at Turriff Secondary School and Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. He graduated as MA and BSc (in agricultural science) from the University of Aberdeen in 1913. He then went to University of Cambridge to work on beech forest under Arthur Tansley and obtained a MS in 1919 (after interruption by military service 1916–1918). From working with Tansley, Watt became part of an academic lineage descended from Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin. Tansley had studied with Francis W. Oliver (1864–1951) at University College, London, who in turn had been mentored by E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929) at University of Cambridge, a student of George Rolleston (1829–1881) at University of Oxford, who had been in turn mentored by Thomas Henry Huxley —"Darwin's bulldog"— in London.

He was appointed lecturer of forest botany and forest zoology at the University of Aberdeen. He continued his research on southern English beech forest in vacations and obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1924.

In 1929, he became lecturer of forestry at University of Cambridge and, when this undergraduate subject was given up, lecturer of forest botany – "a title which scarcely reflected his wide interest in and influence on plant ecology".

He accepted to be visiting lecturer at the University of Colorado in 1963 and visiting professor at the University of Khartoum in 1965. In 1970, he co-organized a symposium science in nature conservation.

He was president of the British Ecological Society 1946–1947.

Fellow of the Royal Society since 1957. is a true citation classic in scientific ecology. The paper describes the plant community "as a working mechanism, which maintains and regenerates itself". The view it advocated that a plant community consists of a mosaic of phases differing in the stage of the life cycle of the dominant species, with correlated effects on the accompanying species.

Watt published a long series of scientific papers in the New Phytologist under the collective heading "Contributions to the ecology of bracken" (1940–1971). Watt was a posthumous co-author of the substantive account on bracken in the Biological Flora of the British Isles. Watt wrote a series of preliminary drafts that were extended and updated by his co-author.

Much of Watt's field studies were centred on the Breckland not far from Cambridge. Here, he studied the effect of grazing and dereliction on grassland vegetation.