Alan Reece Longhurst (born 5 March 1925) is a British-born Canadian oceanographer who invented the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder, and is widely known for his contributions to the primary scientific literature, together with his numerous monographs, most notably the "Ecological Geography of the Sea". He led an effort that produced the first estimate of global primary production in the oceans using satellite imagery, and also quantified vertical carbon flux through the planktonic ecosystem via the biological pump. More recently, he has offered a number of critical reviews of several aspects of fishery management science and climate change science.
Early life and education
Alan Longhurst was born in Plymouth, England, the son of a naval dental surgeon. He spent four years in the British army, graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst at the end of the war (1945). He then went to take part in the Allied occupation of Austria, ending up in Somalia and Abyssinia with the East African forces.
After the war, he returned to London for a degree in entomology and then a doctoral degree in zoology (1952) at the Bedford College of the University of London (England) on the ecology and taxonomy of Notostraca, a small group of living‐fossil, fresh‐water crustaceans.
Career
Early in his career, Longhurst studied the ecology of benthic communities and demersal fish on the continental shelf of the Gulf of Guinea (1954-1963) during service at the West African Fisheries Research Institute in Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Federal Fisheries Service in Lagos, Nigeria. In the middle of this early period, he took a job for less than a year in Wellington at the Fishery Department of New Zealand and worked on racial differences in snappers. Subsequently, he focused on the trophic structure and flux of energy through the pelagic ecosystems of the eastern Pacific Ocean (1963-1971), the Barents Sea (1973), the eastern Canadian Arctic (1983-1989) and the Northwest Atlantic Ocean (1978-1994). He coordinated the international EASTROPAC expeditions in the 1960s and was the first Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of the US National Marine Fisheries Service in La Jolla, California (1967-1971). Returning to England in 1971, he accepted a position as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Marine Environmental Research in Plymouth. Later, in Canada, he was Director of the Marine Ecology Laboratory at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Nova Scotia (1977-1979). His final administrative appointment was Director-General of that Institute (1980-1986). He later turned down the position of Assistant Deputy Minister of Science at the national headquarters of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Government of Canada) in favour of a going "back to the bench" as a research scientist.
Longhurst has published more than 80 research papers and his most recent books are "Ecological Geography of the Sea" (1st edition 1998, 2nd edition 2007) and "Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries" (2010). He has also written on "Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science" from a personal perspective. In retirement after retirement in 1995, he and his wife Françoise opened and operated Galerie l'Acadie, a not-for-profit gallery of contemporary art in Cajarc, France.
Awards
In 1988, Longhurst was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1991, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada for his cumulative influence in the development of Canadian oceanography. In 1997, he received the A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography "in recognition of sustained excellence in the study of marine food webs and biogeography, and of outstanding leadership in the development of international collaboration and in the administration of world-renowned oceanographic programs".
Ecological Geography of the Sea
"Ecological Geography of the Sea" is a book on the regional geography of the world ocean for ecologists. According to Longhurst, regional oceanographic processes are paramount in molding the characteristics of regional ecosystems. A central argument of this book is that spatial bounds to ocean ecosystems can be set by reference to features of the physical circulation of the oceans rather than to the distribution of individual species.