Plant ecology in the context of "Botanist"

Botany, also called phytology or plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology that studies plants, especially their anatomy, taxonomy, and ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who specialises in this field. "Plant" and "botany" may be defined more narrowly to include only land plants and their study, which is also known as phytology. Phytologists or botanists (in the strict sense) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants, including some 391,000 species of vascular plants (of which approximately 369,000 are flowering plants) and approximately 20,000 bryophytes.

Botany originated as prehistoric herbalism to identify and later cultivate plants that were edible, poisonous, and medicinal, making it one of the first endeavours of human investigation. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants that possibly had medicinal benefits. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy and led in 1753 to the binomial system of nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day for the naming of all biological species.

Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (3 November 1841 – 2 April 1924), known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist and a pioneering figure in the development of ecology. In 1895 Warming published Plantesamfund, often regarded as the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology, and he taught an early university course in ecology. Scholar R. J. Goodland wrote in 1975: “If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”.

Warming wrote a number of textbooks on botany, plant geography and ecology, which were widely read and translated to several languages. Notable works include Plantesamfund and Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik.

Christen Christensen Raunkiær (29 March 1860 – 11 March 1938) was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season ("life forms") and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's climatic zones. This scheme, the Raunkiær system, is still widely used today and may be seen as a precursor of modern plant strategy schemes, e.g. J. Philip Grime's CSR system.