Pierre Dansereau

Pierre Dansereau

Pierre Dansereau, ecologist, educator (b at Montréal 5 Oct 1911; d there 29 Sep 2011 ). Educated at the Institut agricole d'Oka, Qué, and at Geneva (DSc 1939), Dansereau worked at the Montreal Botanical Garden (1939-42) and taught at the University of Michigan (1950-55) before becoming dean of science at Université de Montréal in 1955. He was professor of botany and geography at Columbia University (1961-68) while also adjunct director of the New York Botanical Garden and joined Université du Québec à Montréal as professor of ecology in 1972. Dansereau's 1957 book, Biogeography; An Ecological Perspective, won him an international reputation, and he later popularized his theme in one of the influential CBC Massey lectures: "Inscape and Landscape" (1972; published in 1973). A more recent book is L'Envers et l'endroit (1994).

Dansereau made a transition to human ecology (1966), to land management (1970) and later to world ethics (1990). He transmitted important scientific and humane values to his students and sought to combine the strengths of technical scholarship in English with the broader emphases of the French tradition, notably Teilhard de Chardin's concept of mind as part of the continuum of evolution. He is a member of the Royal Society, a Companion of the Order of Canada and has received the Molson Prize (1975), the Killam Prize (1985), the Ordre national du Québec (1985), the Lawson Medal from the Canadian Botanical Association (1986) and the Dawson Medal from the Royal Society of Canada (1995).

See alsoBIOGEOGRAPHY; ECOSYSTEM.