for National Geographic News
While tracing the intellectual influences on Charles Darwin, two
biologists have identified a garden planted at the beginning of the 19th
century in southeast England that they say is "arguably the world's
first ecological experiment."
Darwin wrote in his seminal work of
1859, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, it appeared
that a plot of ground sown with several different types of grass was
more productive than a similar plot with just one species of grass.
Origin of Species was not footnoted, and scientists have long wondered what experiment Darwin was referring to.
Andy Hector, a biologist at Imperial College in London, and Rowan Hooper of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, sifted through Darwin's writings. They discovered the answer to the mysterious passage in a manuscript titled Natural Selection, which they found in the British Museum's Rare Manuscripts collection.
Writing in the January 25 issue of the journal Science, the authors say a garden at Woburn Abbey in southeast England, which was planted in the early 1800s, provides the intellectual link between biodiversity and ecosystem biology first made by Darwin.
"The study of ecosystems ecology has a long history, but the explicit link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is only about 10 years old," said Hector. "It's amazing how many of the questions in ecology and evolution can be traced back to Darwin's writings."
Searching History
George Sinclair, under the aegis of the Duke of Bedford, planted the garden at Woburn Abbey in the early 1800s. The garden was laid out in 242 plots, each two feet by two feet, and fenced in by boards set in cast-iron frames. Leaded tanks were used for aquatic plant species. Each plot was planted with different combinations of grass species and herbs in different types of soil.
Sinclair compared the performance of the different plots in terms of their numbers, sizes, and reproduction. The study, while clearly not up to snuff in terms of modern methods of experimental design and statistical analysis, nevertheless is impressive even by today's standards, say the authors.
Sinclair first published a description of the Woburn Abbey garden in 1816. The results of his experiments were published in 1826 in the third edition of a book titled Hortus Gramineus Woburnensis, or Account of the Results of Experiments on the Produce and Nutritive Qualities of Different Grasses and Other Plants.
The experiment convinced both Sinclair and Darwin that species-rich communities are more productive than ecosystems dominated by fewer species.
"This is a view that today's ecologists have recently confirmed," said Hooper. "Sinclair's work was largely forgotten. Biodiversity scientists have independently arrived at a similar conclusion."
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