John Thomas Curtis (September 20, 1913 – June 7, 1961) was an American

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

and plant

ecologist Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

. He is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Together with J. Roger Bray, he developed the method of polar ordination (now known as Bray-Curtis ordination) with its inherent distance measure, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity. Curtis completed his Ph.D. in

botany Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek w ...

at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

in 1937. He remained affiliated with that university for the remainder of his career, except through 1942–1945, when he served as research director of the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole. Both in 1942 and in 1956, he was awarded

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the art ...

s. In 1951 he was made full professor of

at the

. The collective efforts of Curtis and the thirty-nine Ph.D. students that he managed to supervise during his relatively short career, resulted in the work ‘’’The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities, published 1959. This book remains one of the important contributions to the field of plant ecology during the twentieth century, and spawned the Wisconsin School of North American plant ecology. He was also a "well-known contributor" to the '' Bulletin of the American Orchid Society''.

Selected scientific works

* A study of relic Wisconsin prairies by the species-presence method (with H. C. Greene).

Ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overl ...

, 30 (1): 83–92. 1949
Full text
* The interrelations of certain analytic and synthetic phytosociological characters (with Robert P. McIntosh).

, 31 (3): 434–455. 1950
Full text
* An upland forest continuum in the prairie-forest border region of Wisconsin (with Robert P. McIntosh).

, 32 (3): 476–496. 1951
Full text
* An ordination of the upland forest communities of Southern Wisconsin (with J. Roger Bray). Ecological Monographs 27 (4): 325–349. 1957
Full text
* The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 1959.

References

''Arboretum News'', June 1961

Obituary, June 8 1961
{{DEFAULTSORT:Curtis, John T. People from Waukesha, Wisconsin 1913 births 1961 deaths University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty American ecologists Writers from Wisconsin Plant ecologists Scientists from Wisconsin 20th-century American botanists