Arthur Tansley

Early life and education

Tansley was born in London to businessman George Tansley followed by Arthur seven years later, in 1871. In 1907 he took a Lecturer position at the University of Cambridge. In 1923 he resigned his position at Cambridge and spent a year in Vienna studying psychology under Sigmund Freud. In establishing this journal, Tansley's aim was to provide a venue for the publication of "notes and suggestions"; existing botanical journals only published records of completed research. in which he introduced the ecosystem concept. In the 1930s ecological thinking was dominated by the work of Clements, who thought of ecological communities as organisms, and associations as superorganisms. and he devised it to draw attention to the importance of transfers of materials between organisms and their environment, regarding ecosystems as the basic units of nature. Tansley's most comprehensive work, The British Islands and Their Vegetation was published in 1939. Volume 2 was published in 1949. In recognition of this achievement, he was awarded the Linnean Medal in 1941.