Victor Ernest Shelford

Victor Ernest Shelford (September 22, 1877 – December 27, 1968) was an American zoologist and animal ecologist who helped to establish ecology as a distinct field of study. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, and helped found the Nature Conservancy in the 1940s. Shelford's early visits to and study of Volo Bog in Northern Illinois helped establish its ecological significance. Volo Bog became the first purchase of the Illinois Nature Conservancy.

Early career His thesis work led him to five further publications on "Ecological Succession," which were published in the Biological Bulletin in 1911 and 1912. By 1913 he published one of his great works on ecology, Animal Communities in Temperate America. He took a position for the University of Illinois, where he ended up spending most of his career, in 1914 as an assistant and associate professor of zoology. From then he helped organize the Ecological Society of America (ESA), and became its first president in 1916. He edited and helped compile Naturalist's Guide to the Americas, a 761-page volume published in 1926 that served as an inventory of preserved natural areas and areas in need of protection, for the ESA. This helped him with his later work, The Ecology of North America (1963).

By 1927 Shelford was made a full professor in his position at the University of Illinois. He also was interested in experimental research in both the field and the laboratory. In 1929 he had published Laboratory and Field Ecology, which served as a method book for research in animal ecology. Shelford was known to travel into the field every summer to conduct research. He initiated the "century-cycle" project in 1933 at the University of Illinois' William Trelease Woods, which was used to study the relation between vertebrate and invertebrate populations with environmental factors. The first fifteen years of data collected from this project was published in 1951 in Ecological Monographs. Shelford was the biologist in charge for the Illinois Natural History Survey at their research laboratories from 1914 to 1929. He had also been director of marine ecology at the Puget Sound Biological Station during alternate summers from 1914 to 1930. Some of his work from this time was published in 1935 in Ecological Monographs.

Shelford's work with Clements helped to begin to develop the idea of biomes by characterizing them through flora and fauna. His next work took this further. Representing his last major work, The Ecology of North America (1963) brought Shelford throughout North America in his research. In 1968, he received the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America for his lifelong contributions to the field of ecology.

He also chaired numerous committees, including the Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions of the Ecological Society from 1917 to 1938, and the National Research Council Committee on Grasslands from 1932 to 1939. In addition, he founded the Grassland Research Foundation in 1939, which he presided over in 1958, and served as chairman of their scientific advisory board from 1959 to 1968. He died in Urbana, Illinois.