Peter Greig-Smith (1922–2003) was a British plant ecologist, founder of the discipline of quantitative ecology in the United Kingdom. He had a deep influence across the world on vegetation studies and plant ecology, mostly from his book Quantitative Plant Ecology, first published in 1957 and a must-read for multiple generations of young ecologists. In 1952, Greig-Smith was hired by the University College of North Wales at Bangor, Wales (now Bangor University), where he spent the rest of his academic career. His book Quantitative Plant Ecology spread the ideas of rigorous, quantitative ecological methods among the world’s research community, and made his lab at Bangor a magnet for plant biologists with an interest in mathematical and statistical methods. A stout supporter of Bangor’s graduate program in ecology, he recruited and advised many students and research collaborators from all continents.
A prominent member of the British Ecological Society, he was first elected to council in 1957, and in 1961 he became honorary secretary. He held this post until 1964, when he resigned to become editor of the Journal of Ecology, the society’s scientific publication. He remained as editor until 1968. In 1977 he was elected vice president of the society, and served as president in 1978 and 1979.
Early work
Greig-Smith went to school in Birmingham, United Kingdom, before going to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was inspired by the teachings of Alexander S. Watt, the first British botanist to seriously study the phenomenon of pattern and scaling in plant communities from a quantitative perspective. Watt’s influence can be seen in Greig-Smith’s obituaries of him.
In 1944, after graduating from Cambridge, Greig-Smith went to the Imperial College’s Field Station at Slough, where he studied the effect of herbicides on oilseed crops under the direction of Geoffrey E. Blackman, founder of the science of selective herbicides in Britain. The Slough herbicide tests, part of Britain’s war effort, involved the planting of large-scale experiments with random block and nested designs, an experience that played a central role in nurturing Greig-Smith's interest in statistical methods and experimental plot designs.
In 1945, he moved to the University of Manchester as lecturer in botany. At Manchester, he cultivated a wide array of research interests, ranging from the taxonomy of liverworts and stinging nettles, the causes of spatial pattern in dune plants, the quantitative morphology and tussock formation of Ammophila arenaria (marram grass), and the biogeographic distribution of liverworts to understand the fate of vegetation in the British Isles during the last glaciation.
Dune ecology
Greig-Smith’s first published paper dealt with the varying growth forms of the dune grass Ammophila arenaria in calcareous sand dunes on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides. This paper was followed two years later by a detailed description of the dune's plants, using quantitative methods to describe the plant community. These early papers already mark his interest for quantification of natural phenomena. In this morphometric analysis of Ammophila arenaria, for example, Greig-Smith measured in detail the internode length of the plant’s rhizomes and noted the species’ tendency to form tussock-like clumps in older dunes and longer, exploratory rhizomes in unstable, younger dunes.
Taxonomy and biogeography
Some of Greig-Smith’s early work was devoted to taxonomy and biogeography, trying to bring a quantitative approach to these branches of the biological sciences. Much of his taxonomic work was devoted to the evolutionary taxonomy and ecology of some liverworts (Lejeuneaceae).
In 1950, he published a synthesis paper on the taxonomy and biogeography of liverworts, as an early attempt to shed some light on the question of the effects of Quaternary glaciations on the history of the British flora. He tried to evaluate how many of the extant British liverworts had survived these glaciations in situ and how many, in contrast, were postglacial migrants from southern latitudes. This work as done almost two decades before the theory of glaciation refugia was proposed by Jürgen Haffer for the Amazon.
Greig-Smith also wrote a synthesis of the natural history of nettles of the United Kingdom with a detailed analysis of the plant communities where they prospered.