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| Home > 125th > Articles > People | May 12, 2009 | |||
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Pioneering New Approaches to Science, All in a Day's Work By Gaye Farris
Jim Grace of the USGS National Wetlands Research Center in Lafayette, LA, has achieved international prominence as a pioneer in the approach to studying natural systems. Yet he still finds time to assist other scientists and his community. Contributions to Natural Science One of Grace's main contributions has been to point out that natural science is largely about studying interacting systems, yet our core scientific methods are only designed to study individual processes in isolation. He contends that the "analysis of parts" approach typically used in science has a limited capacity to answer the most important questions. Grace is an advocate of considering all of the parts of a natural system. His work in pioneering the study of multivariate hypotheses is beginning to attract broad attention. Grace's primary scientific responsibility is to conduct research to conserve coastal ecosystems and in particular to restore and maintain native plant communities in coastal prairie ecosystems along the Gulf of Mexico. Although he is the classic scholar, Grace is tireless in the practical support of natural resource managers. His partnerships include Fish and Wildlife Service's national wildlife refuges along the Gulf Coast, where he frequently meets with DOI refuge managers and biologists to help refine methods to manage fire and invasive species. In 2003, Jim was active in the USGS Fire Science Coordination Team, which wrote a document to assist the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies in fire monitoring and management options. Service to Science and Community Grace is always willing to lend assistance and give advice to more junior researchers at the Center and elsewhere. He also forms collaborations with other scientists that raise the level of scientific output of all involved. He is active in training graduate students and teaches occasional special-topic seminars at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is passionately devoted to the promotion of science in his own community. He serves on the board of the Lafayette Natural History Museum and Planetarium and has played a major role in the redesign of the museum's new exhibit. Grace's work has been published in high-impact journals such as Ecology, American Naturalist, Oikos, and Oecologia. He has also given over 50 invited lectures and seminars in North America and Europe and has served on numerous journal editorial boards and panels such as those of the National Science Foundation. Grace has written two books and is finishing a third. His first, Perspectives on Plant Competition, is considered the definitive book on plant competition, and his second, Analysis of Ecological Communities, has been said by reviewers to set the standard for design and analysis of ecological plant communities. His most recent effort, Exploring Natural Systems using Multivariate Hypotheses, points the way to a new approach to scientific investigation that has great promise for advancing natural science. At the end of this book, he uses the analogy of symphonic music to make the point that scientists need to be able to "listen" to many processes simultaneously if they are to understand systems. For his work, Grace has received the 2000 Merit Award from the Society of Wetland Scientist, Certificate of Appreciation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for contributions to conservation, an Outstanding Teaching Award from Louisiana State University and a Distinguished Service Citation from the Society of Wetland Scientists. In 2003 he was honored by the Central Region, Biology Discipline, with a regional science excellence award. |
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