Phytogeographic Research Articles

Im Grunde ein Bild: Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe, und Alexander von Humboldt by Michael Bies (review)

Reviewed by: Im Grunde ein Bild: Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe, und Alexander von Humboldt by Michael Bies Sean Franzel Michael Bies, Im Grunde ein Bild: Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe, und Alexander von Humboldt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. 371 pp. This rich study provides a new and welcome look at the concept of Darstellung, a central linchpin of the aesthetics of the Goethezeit. Though philosophical and literary articulations of Darstellung have been dealt with in detail in recent decades by Winfried Menninghaus, Martha Helfer, and others, Michael Bies pursues a compellingly synthetic project that brings Kant, Goethe, and [End Page 270] Humboldt into resonance with each other in original ways. Specifically, Bies tracks the aesthetics of Darstellung and the preoccupation with the role of the image (Bild) in new knowledge production across scientific writing, in literary and philosophical exposition, and in Goethe’s and Humboldt’s experiments with visual images in their botanical studies. As Bies describes it, the model of an image that can manifest a holistic conception of nature in an immediate and vivid way—in contrast to a purely abstract depiction or one that manifests only the limited results of a single scientific discipline—served to organize much of the diverse literary, philosophical, and scientific output of the period. Along with addressing issues of central poetic and aesthetic importance, this study will also be of value for scholars working on the history of science and the popularization of science, as well as on media and performance studies. One of the benefits of Bies’s study is that he casts the aesthetic problem of Darstellung against the backdrop of the emergence of modern scientific disciplines. If the general trend of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is one of disciplinary Ausdifferenzierung, then for Bies the model of Darstellung serves as a locus of de-differentiation (Entdifferenzierung), which synthesizes aesthetics with modes of new knowledge production. Bies thus rightly treats discussions about Darstellung as a key site of contact between aesthetics and the sciences. This insight has far-reaching implications: for one, Bies convincingly argues that this model of Darstellung is at work in the popularization of science (commonly associated later in the nineteenth century with a model of Humboldtian science) and in the more general problem of the place of literary style in philosophical and scientific exposition. Additionally, Bies shows how the problem of intermediality (particularly the intersection of text and image) lies at the heart of modern conceptions of new knowledge production; here the interaction between text and image at work in Goethe’s botanical drawings and in Humboldt’s famous plates depicting plant geography overlaps with these authors’ synthetic visions of the natural world as lebendige Natur. Following the general Foucauldian thesis of the early nineteenth-century turn away from a “classical” Enlightenment model of abstract representation, Bies describes what he calls an epochal “Medienwandel von Text zum Bild” that poses the question of the interrelations of text and image, of abstraction and concretion, in new ways. The book opens with a detailed study of Kant’s theory of Darstellung against the backdrop of eighteenth-century poetics. Drawing on Klopstock’s distinction between lively presentation that accesses the imagination and intuition (Darstellung) and abstract, scientific presentation (Abhandlung), Bies shows how Kant’s concepts of Anschauung, Darstellung, hypotyposis, and aesthetic idea articulate an emergent aesthetics of the lively image. Indeed, he situates Kant as one of the crucial instigators of the aesthetics of Darstellung that would come to preoccupy Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics. Additionally, Bies considers the extent to which certain features of Kant’s style lend themselves to be read as examples of Darstellung. Bies then turns to Goethe, exploring his work on botany and the philosophical roots thereof in Goethe’s engagement with Kant and Spinoza. Bies compellingly lays out how Goethe’s reception of the Critique of Judgement—and in particular Kant’s analogy between the work of art and the natural organism—influenced his botanical studies and his various attempts to formulate their results. He explores Goethe’s idea of the “naturgemäße Methode” of studying nature, as well as his aspiration to give the results...

Community concepts in plant ecology: from Humboldtian plant geography to the superorganism and beyond

Abstract. The paper seeks to provide an introduction to, and review of, the history of concepts of the plant community. Eighteenth-century naturalists recognised that vegetation was distributed geographically and that different species of plants and animals were interconnected in what would later be called ecological relationships. It was not, however, until the early nineteenth century that the study of vegetation became a distinctive and autonomous form of scientific inquiry. Humboldt was the first to call communities of plants "associations". His programme for the empirical study of plant communities was extended by many European and North American botanists, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. There developed an almost complete consensus among ecologists that vegetation was made up of natural communities, discrete entities with real boundaries. However, there was little agreement about the nature of the putative unit or how it should be classified. Gleason advanced the alternative view that vegetation was an assemblage of individual plants, with each species being distributed according to its own physiological requirements and competitive interactions. This debate was never wholly resolved and the divergent opinions can be discerned within early ecosystem theory.

Gathering “wild” food in the city: rethinking the role of foraging in urban ecosystem planning and management

Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views about the roles of humans in urban green spaces, has potential to also support sustainability goals. Drawing on research from Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle, we show that foraging is a vibrant and ongoing practice among diverse urban residents in the USA. At the same time, as reflected in regulations, planning practices, and attitudes of conservation practitioners, it is conceptualised as out of place in urban landscapes and an activity to be discouraged. We discuss how paying attention to urban foraging spaces and practices can strengthen green space planning and summarise opportunities for and challenges associated with including foragers and their concerns.

The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City's High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line's redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.

Trasmigrazione di piante trasferimenti di concetti: la lettura scientifica ed estetica del paesaggio sud americano in Alexander von Humboldt

The institution of plant geography as a science in Alexander von Humboldt implies for the first time the emergence of concept of migration concerning plants and animals. But plant geography and the study on vegetation in Humboldt’s books aims to conjugate various natural sciences in order to reach an understanding of the geographical distribution of vegetation. A new approach in South American analysis, connected with an aestethic lecture of Tropical lands of New Word, redefines the idea of “New” thanks to use of analogic concepts based on science and European aestethic lexicon.

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A biogeographic island

book reviews ISSN 1948‐6596 A biogeographic island Plant Geography of Chile. Plant and Vegetation, Volume 5. Andres Moreira‐Munoz, 2011, Springer. 320 pp. £153.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐0‐948‐18747‐8. http//www.springer.com/ It is of some surprise that we have had to wait just over a century, since the appearance of Karl Frie‐ drich Reiche’s celebrated work Grundzuge der Pflanzenverbreitung in 1907, for a new look at the plant geography of Chile. It is quite surprising because this long, thin country, covering more degrees of latitude than any other, has some of the most fascinating physical geography of any country on the planet. In fact its geography was once described as ‘crazy’, in the title of the much‐ cited work by the Chilean author Subercaseaux (1940): “Chile o una loca geografia”. Contained by the imposing Andean chain and the vast Pacific Ocean, continental Chile is a biogeographic island of extraordinary contrasts. The extremes are the Atacama Desert in the north, which is the driest and coolest, and to the south the sub‐Antarctic forests are some of the wettest in the world. What a ‘scientific playground’ for biologists from all disciplines, particularly those interested in bio‐ geography! But what makes it even more mouth‐ watering are its Gondwanan origins and the fact that the Chilean territory includes the fascinating and famous Pacific offshore islands of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Juan Fernandez Archipelago and the lesser known Islas Desventuradas. The present volume is rightfully dedicated to Karl Friedrich Reiche, by the author, who him‐ self comes from an important Chilean botanical dynasty. Carlos Munoz Pizarro, the grandfather of Andres Moreira‐Munoz, is well known for his dedi‐ cation to the Chilean flora and passion for its con‐ servation—he published widely on both subjects. His dedication was such that he named his three daughters after Poaceae (grass family) genera. One of them, Melica Munoz‐Schick, the mother of the author, followed in her father’s footsteps and became curator of the National Museum of Natu‐ ral History in Santiago for a period of 42 years where she researched and published widely on the Chilean flora. This lineage has of course been very influential on the author’s chosen career as a plant scientist and has now led to this authorita‐ tive work on the plant geography of Chile, which was also the subject of his recent PhD (Moreira‐ Munoz 2007). Each chapter within the five main sections of the book commences with an abstract and con‐ cludes with a comprehensive list of references. The layout is pleasing, with use of high‐quality colour photographs, line drawings and very infor‐ mative and often comparative maps. The first chapter gives an overview of the physical geogra‐ phy (past and present) which has influenced the vascular flora and its biogeographical patterns. The second chapter is a very useful chronology of the discovery of the Chilean flora, tracing the his‐ tory of the botanists and naturalists who helped to shape Chilean botany. It starts with the arrival of Hernando de Magallanes (Ferdinand Magellan) in the Magellan Straits in 1520 and details the many Europeans from France, Germany and Spain in particular. It includes the young Charles Darwin, whose visit to south and central Chile most influ‐ enced his famed Theory of Evolution. Rightfully, much is made of the extraordinarily high levels of endemism within the Chilean flora: 4 families, 84 genera and 1933 species. The number of endemic species equates to 45% of the flora and represents the highest percentage of any South American country. Because of these high levels of endemism (and because of the immense threats it faces) 40% of continental Chile has been declared a Biodiver‐ sity Hot Spot, which is known as the Chilean Win‐ ter Rainfall–Valdivian Forests (Moreira‐Munoz 2005). These integral links exemplify the relatively new field of conservation biogeography (Whittaker et al. 2005). In Chapter 6 the author discusses the challenges of conservation biogeog‐ raphy effectively. The recent (last 40 years) rapid frontiers of biogeography 5.2, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society

A diverse scientific life

I am very honoured to be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Paleolimnological Association (IPA). I was delighted when two of my teachers and mentors, Frank Oldfield (2010) and Herb Wright (2010), were awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2009 at the Guadalajara IPA symposium—I never thought I would be following them 3 years later in Glasgow. In accepting this Award, I must first make a confession. Despite becoming a Quaternary pollen analyst and vegetation historian in 1961, I did not do any real palaeolimnology until 1986, although I had paddled a little in Crose Mere and Diss Mere and studied their fascinating palaeolimnology in 1976 and 1979. I have never counted a diatom, cladoceran, chironomid, or chrysophyte cyst in my life. I only know the taxa as eight-character codes (e.g. TA003A, Cory amb) for variables in computer programs such as CANOCO, C2, WACALIB, etc. I have been very fortunate to have a wonderfully diverse and intellectually rich and challenging scientific life, including my mid-career conversion to quantitative palaeolimnology in 1987. My scientific interests, activities, and publications fall into seven main groups (Fig. 1), all of which continue to the present day. These are (1) pollen analysis, vegetation history, and palaeoecology starting in 1961, (2) bryology starting in 1963, (3) floristics and alpine botany starting in 1965, (4) plant ecology starting in 1965, (5) quantitative palaeoecology starting in 1972, (6) plant geography starting in 1976, and (7) palaeolimnology starting fully in 1987. Although I try to maintain these various interests, increasing age and decreasing memory capacity for further alpine plant names reduce my alpine botanical activities. Lack of time limits my bryological activities, and plant ecology and plant geography are increasingly becoming secondary interests, simply because the size of the current relevant literature is totally overwhelming. I find it near impossible to keep up with the exponentially increasing literature on pollen analysis, quantitative palaeoecology, and The author was the recipient of a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ presented by the International Paleolimnology Association (IPA) in Glasgow, UK on 22 August 2012.

A naturalist of the Northern Enlightenment: Peter Forsskål after 250 years

Peter Forsskål (1732–1763) was the naturalist on the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia (1761–1767), a particularly rich example of the eighteenth century era of scientific exploration and a quintessential project of the Enlightenment. Forsskål is noteworthy for his early writings in philosophy and politics and for his outstanding contributions to the botanical and zoological knowledge of the Middle East, specifically Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, principally Yemen. His biological work stands out for the large number of species identified, its attention to detail, the expansiveness of his descriptions, his knowledge and use of Arabic and his early ideas on plant geography. Forsskål's research in the marine biology of the Red Sea was also pioneering. His publications and collections represent the single greatest contribution to the knowledge of the natural history of the Middle East in the eighteenth century and are still valued by scholars today. His skill in retaining local terminology in Arabic and his respect for the contributions of local inhabitants to this work are also worth noting. When he died of malaria in 1763 in Yemen, the eighteenth-century world of natural science lost a promising and adventurous scientist.

Finding Probabilistic Prevalent Colocations in Spatially Uncertain Data Sets

A spatial colocation pattern is a group of spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in geographic space. Discovering colocations has many useful applications. For example, colocated plant species discovered from plant distribution data sets can contribute to the analysis of plant geography, phytosociology studies, and plant protection recommendations. In this paper, we study the colocation mining problem in the context of uncertain data, as the data generated from a wide range of data sources are inherently uncertain. One straightforward method to mine the prevalent colocations in a spatially uncertain data set is to simply compute the expected participation index of a candidate and decide if it exceeds a minimum prevalence threshold. Although this definition has been widely adopted, it misses important information about the confidence which can be associated with the participation index of a colocation. We propose another definition, probabilistic prevalent colocations, trying to find all the colocations that are likely to be prevalent in a randomly generated possible world. Finding probabilistic prevalent colocations (PPCs) turn out to be difficult. First, we propose pruning strategies for candidates to reduce the amount of computation of the probabilistic participation index values. Next, we design an improved dynamic programming algorithm for identifying candidates. This algorithm is suitable for parallel computation, and approximate computation. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the methods proposed as well as the pruning strategies and the optimization techniques are verified by extensive experiments with “real + synthetic” spatially uncertain data sets.

Essay on the Geography of Plants

Review of Essay on the Geography of Plants. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen T. Jackson. Translated by Sylvie Romanowski. 2009. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Pp. 296, 1 color plate, 9 halftones, 7 tables, 1 poster. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780226360669.

Essay on the Geography of Plants

Review of Essay on the Geography of Plants. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen T. Jackson. Translated by Sylvie Romanowski. 2009. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Pp. 296, 1 color plate, 9 halftones, 7 tables, 1 poster. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780226360669.

Le botaniste Désiré Cauvet et l'enseignement des théories transformistes à la Faculté de médecine et de pharmacie de Lyon à la fin du XIXe siècle

Désiré Cauvet : a botanist teaching transformism and Darwinian theory at the Faculté de médecine et pharmacie de Lyon during the last part of the XIXth century. - After serving as a military pharmacist, Philippe Désiré Cauvet (1827-1890), who was also a doctor in medicine and in science, was named in 1877 professor of materia medica and botany at the newly established Faculté de médecine et de pharmacie de Lyon. He was the author of several books and many botanical publications and he published in 1879 his Cours élémentaire de botanique where he introduced an exposition of botanical geography according to Grisebach and of Darwinian principles (mainly natural selection). He is one of the preeminent provincial French teachers who exposed Darwinian theory during the years 1870-1880. Such facts are to be considered when discussing the introduction of Darwinism in France.

Andrés Moreira-Muñoz. Plant Geography of Chile

Andrés Moreira-Muñoz. Plant Geography of Chile

Essay on the Geography of Plants (review)

Essay on the Geography of Plants (review)

Ecological niche modeling meets phylogeography to unravel hidden past history of key forest genera in plant geography: Podocarpus and Nothofagus

Ecological niche modeling meets phylogeography to unravel hidden past history of key forest genera in plant geography: Podocarpus and Nothofagus

061 Proteaceae : key family of plant geography, in time and space, living and fossil, ecology and phylogeny

061 Proteaceae : key family of plant geography, in time and space, living and fossil, ecology and phylogeny

Essay on the Geography of Plants

Essay on the Geography of Plants

Scaling the Period Eye: Oscar Drude and the Cartographical Practice of Plant Geography, 1870s–1910s

ArgumentThe historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged “golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generation plant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the age of discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitative modification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of the plant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamics of botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledge production: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading of maps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well as a widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via maps in the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these “popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains, botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element of botanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus a formative influence on collective perception – the botanist's “period eye” – regarding plant distribution.

Alexander von Humboldt: Counternarrative of a dissenter?

When, in 2009, Charles Darwin’s bicentennial was celebrated all over the world, Alexander von Humboldt—whom Darwin admired and whose American travel account he head read on the Beagle—remained in the Englishman’s shadow. The fact that Humboldt had passed away in 1859 at least allowed historians to honor yet another anniversary, i.e., exactly one and a half centuries of post-Humboldtian commemoration. Darwin’s seminal insights into the principle of evolution, the variability of species, and the struggle for life among these (which others abbreviated in the even more powerful—and misused—phrase ‘‘survival of the fittest’’) seemed to outmatch the sprawling, hard-to-compress oeuvre of the Prussian naturalist Humboldt. The history of Humboldt’s publication alone is so complicated that, in 2000, a 500-page bibliography was published in Germany to trace the man’s published record. More importantly, Darwin’s thoughts still mobilize public opinion and fuel outcry on the part of Christian fundamentalists, thus guaranteeing media resonance even in the Internet age. In contrast, there seems to be much patina on the figure of Humboldt. As charmingly erudite as he was a person and as fascinating his journeys to America and Siberia (often forgotten, though, in light of the first) were, it has always been and remains hard to pin down Humboldt, his views, and his original achievements. The most important of those achievements concern the geography of plants, the establishment of isolines, and his encouragement to pursue comparative scientific research using the most up-to-date instruments, an approach that historians condensed long after his death in the term ‘‘Humboldtian science.’’ Why then does Humboldt matter today? And why, as Laura Dassow Walls wants us to believe (rightly so, as I think,) did Humboldt matter for the North American society and in particular for the intellectual life in the United States during the long nineteenth century? After all, the United States is generally not regarded as an Humboldtian turf,