The Springer authors Monica Turner and Stuart Chapin will receive two prestigious awards from the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Turner is the winner of this year's Robert H. MacArthur Award presented for outstanding ecological achievement. Chapin is given the Sustainability Science Award for his paper "Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate". He shares the honor with Terry Yates, who posthumously receives the award. The awards will be presented to Turner and Chapin at ESA's 93rd Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on August 4, 2008.
Monica Turner, professor of ecology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is one of the founders of the discipline of landscape ecology. Her seminal publications on the subject led to the first comprehensive textbook on landscape ecology, Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice which she published together with Robert Gardner and Robert O'Neill at Springer in 2001. Moreover, her work in Yellowstone National Park explores the long-term vegetation dynamics in the context of changing fire regimes, grazing by elk, and the complex interactions of plant roots, soil, microbes and nitrogen.
Turner is one of the editors-in-chief of the Springer journal Ecosystems. She is also co-editor of several other Springer books such as Ecosystem Function in Heterogeneous Landscapes (2005), Learning Landscape Ecology (first edition in 2002) and Quantitative Methods in Landscape Ecology: The Analysis and Interpretation of Landscape Heterogeneity (first edition in 1991).
Stuart Chapin is professor of ecology at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. His winning paper integrates several different sources of theory to address sustainability in changing social and ecological systems. He applied this framework to climate change impacts in interior Alaska and described policy strategies that emerged from the analyses. Chapin is one of the authors of the Springer textbook Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology published in 2002. His current research focuses especially on long-term ecological research and human-fire-vegetation interactions.
The Robert H. McArthur Award is presented every other year to an established ecologist in mid-career for meritorious contributions to ecology, in the expectation of continued top-level ecological research. It is named after Robert H. MacArthur (1930-1972), an American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology. The Sustainability Science Award is given each year to recognize research results that provide scientific foundations for sustainable management, link human and ecological systems and advance sustainability science.
The Ecological Society of America is a scientific, non-profit, 10,000-member organization founded in 1915. Through ESA reports, journals, membership research, and expert testimony to Congress, ESA seeks to promote the responsible application of ecological data and principles to the solution of environmental problems.
Springer (www.springer.com) is the second-largest publisher of journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector and the largest publisher of STM books. It publishes on behalf of more than 300 academic associations and professional societies. Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media, one of the world's leading suppliers of scientific and specialist literature. The group publishes over 1,700 journals and more than 5,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in over 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and some 5,000 employees.