Francis C. Evans

Francis Cope Evans (2 December 1914, Philadelphia – 16 August 2002, Ann Arbor) was an American ecologist and professor of zoology. He was the president of the Ecological Society of America from 1983 to 1984.

Biography After secondary education at Germantown Friends School, Evans matriculated at Haverford College and graduated there in 1936 with a bachelor's degree in biology. With a Rhodes Scholarship he was a graduate student in zoology at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1939, when he graduated with a Ph.D. supervised by Charles Sutherland Elton. In 1939 he became a Claypole Memorial Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as a research assistant to the epidemiologist Karl Friedrich Meyer. Evans did fieldwork in California and the Pacific Northwest to study the "relationships of vertebrates, ectoparasites, and disease." and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1963.

Evans married Rachel Worthington Brooks (1915–2002) in June 1942. Upon his death he was survived by his widow, four children, and five grandchildren. This study area came to be known as the "Evans Old Field" and is one of the world's most intensively studied old fields. Evans studied the area's bee fauna (134 species) and their visits to 57 different species of flowering plants.

Selected publications