ABSTRACT
The earliest ecological institutions were aquatic research stations, mostly marine, which began to ourish in the 1870s in Europe and North America (Juday 1910; Kofoid 1910; Jack 1945; Hiatt 1954, 1963; Croker 2001:143-161; Egerton 2014a,b). Four ecological sciences began to emerge during the 1890s: plant ecology, animal ecology, limnology, and marine ecology. In 1899 three research stations were founded in America’s Rocky Mountains by faculty members of three universities, and four other Rocky Mountain biological stations were founded by the year 1914 (Vetter 2011:111-119, 2012). The Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, established a desert eld station in 1903 on the (then) outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, and in 1908 a seashore Carmel Laboratory in California (McGinnies 1981; McIntosh 1983; Bowers 1988; Craig 2005; Egerton 2013:364). In 1908, a botanist at Lenox College, Iowa, Thomas H. Macbride, persuaded the University of Iowa Alumni Association to buy land for a biology eld station on the shore of the West Branch of Lake Okoboji (Lannoo 2012:14-19), which opened in 1909. Macbride commented: “the factors of ecology and distribution are all here.” It was and is a center for both summer courses and research, and during its rst decade, almost 50 biological papers were published on research performed there (Lannoo 2012:30).
