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Professor Ralph Slatyer was interviewed in 1993 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Slatyer's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract discusses his studies into ecological succession in ecosystems where there has been a disturbance, either natural or human-induced. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Ralph Slatyer was born in Melbourne in 1929. He was educated at the University of Western Australia where he received a BSc in 1951, an MSc in 1955 and a DSc in 1960. His studies were in agriculture, particularly in looking at the factors linking plant and water relationships to climatology.
In 1951 he began work as a research scientist with the CSIRO in what became the Division of Land Research. He was an ecoclimatologist, trying to predict the length of the growing season for introduced crops and pastures using climatic information, soil characteristics and other physical factors. He was part of a team that investigated the potential for agriculture in the north of Australia. From 1966-1967 he was the Associate Chief of the Division.
In 1967 Slatyer became the Foundation Professor in Environmental Biology in the Research School of Biological Sciences (RSBS) at the Australian National University (ANU). His research at this time included how plants differ from each other in photosynthesis and transpiration rates. It was here that he began to look at ecological succession in disturbed ecosystems. Also while at the ANU he served as the Director of RSBS (1984-89). On his retirement in 1993 he became Distinguished Scholar in Residence at RSBS.
Slatyer has had enormous influence in Australia's national science milieu. In 1989-92 he served as the Australian Chief Scientist. He was Deputy Chairman of the National Greenhouse Advisory Committee in the Department of the Arts, Sport, Environment and Territories (1989-93) and Chairman of the Cooperative Research Centre Program in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (1989-92).
World environmental issues have been of enduring interest to Slatyer. He has had a long-standing involvement with numerous UNESCO programs. This relationship started in 1965 and included serving on the executive bureau for the Man and the Biosphere program (1971-85), as chairman of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (1981-83) and as Australia's ambassador to UNESCO (1978-81). He also served as president of Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (1982-85), the environment program of the International Council of Scientific Unions.
He has received many honours and awards including the Edgeworth David Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales (1960), the Australian Medal of Agricultural Science (1968), the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal (1977), the ANZAAS Medal (1991) and the Clunies Ross Lifetime Contribution Award (2001). He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1982 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1993.
Slatyer was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1967. He has also been elected to numerous societies and associations, including being a Fellow of the Royal Society (1975), a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (1976), and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (1992).
One thing you looked at was how ecosystems recovered or failed after disturbances.
Yes. There is plenty of good raw material for that in Australia. In ecology, frequently you just don't have the time to run experiments. You have to look for either natural, or human induced, perturbations which have done your experiment for you, or have applied the treatments. Then the answer should be there and the challenge is to see if you can validate it. So disturbances associated with overgrazing or the effects of fire were very important perturbations by which to test the theories.
That was the challenge I set the group. I got pretty heavily involved in it myself, with Ian Noble – a remarkable, very impressive person who came from Adelaide to work with us. (He is now leader of the ecosystems group at the Research School of Biological Sciences. The Environmental Biology group did get to be beyond talking distance and so two separate groups were established, but still with a lot of interactions between them). In the mid-1970s Ian and I began to develop what you might call a phenological basis for understanding whether a plant is likely to persist through a disturbance or to arrive at the site of the disturbance afterwards. And then whether it can reach reproductive age and produce viable propagulus. In other words, whether it is going to be in with a chance in the subsequent series of events that lead to the redevelopment of a community.
Also, I had established a close working relationship with Joe Connell, at Santa Barbara. In about 1973 or '74 I began working with Joe on major mechanisms involved in ecological succession, the temporal change in species composition. The work was intermittent, with ideas, manuscripts and so on going backwards and forwards across the Pacific – plus periods of time in each other's labs. We didn't even have faxes then and telephone calls were too expensive, and neither of us were terribly good correspondents, nevertheless we gradually got our ideas together.
We proposed that the complex array of mechanisms that were involved in ecological succession could be seen as just three basic mechanisms: a community acts in such a way as to facilitate the entry of a new species – and there is evidence for that – or to inhibit the entry of another, new species, or to tolerate the entry of a new species. That seemed to sum up, to a considerable degree, the controlling mechanisms for the temporal variation in composition. It took us two years to put together a paper on this proposition, together with the experimental tests that we thought people could apply in assessing whether these mechanisms were operational or not. In about 1975 we sent the paper to American Naturalist, which was rather slow in refereeing it but published it in 1977.
Your proposition simplified a great problem area. People could now devote their attention to three mechanisms, instead of looking at a massive multifactorial array.
Well, it seems almost self-evident now, but it didn't seem so simple or obvious when we were involved in it.
As you have probably gathered, I am totally committed to cooperative research. I know that a lot of people like to work away almost monkishly by themselves, but I've been so stimulated by interaction with colleagues through my research career that I feel quite unhappy about people depriving themselves of that opportunity and that great experience.
The paper that Joe Connell and I wrote became a citation classic, as did my plant/water relations monograph – that's always a bit of a thrill. When you get a citation classic you are asked to write a little essay as to how it happened. As Joe and I thought about our work, I realised that the successful ingredient was the interaction of our backgrounds. Joe is a great conventional naturalist who knows the names of all the shells on the seashore and stuff like that, and he brought a broad naturalist, community ecologist view of the world to our association. I'm the world's worst taxonomist, but I brought a more physically rigorous background. I am more mathematically inclined, more inclined to look at the physiological mechanisms underlying behaviour or performance rather than simply the manifestation of the performance itself. It was perfect that we should have worked together, although when we started we didn't realise that; it just became apparent to us that we always threw sparks off one another.
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
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