Mesotrophic cerradão, a dense structural form of tree savanna occurring on fertile soils and very deciduous during the dry season. Copyright Sam Bridgewater. Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (1841 – 1924)
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming was the great pioneer in terms of providing a detailed understanding of the ecology and floristics of the cerrado,. Warming was born on the island of Mandø, Denmark in 1841, and studied in Copenhagen. Whilst still a student, Warming spent three years in the small village of Lagoa Santa in Minas Gerais between 1863 and 1866. Despite its remote location, at the time Lagoa Santa had developed a formidable reputation as a centre of tropical scientific research, primarily due to the endeavours of another Dane – Peter Lund – a palaeontologist.
Whilst based at Lagoa Santa, Warming studied the ecology of the cerrado vegetation, as well as undertaking intensive plant collecting. His account of the vegetation of Lagoa Santa (1892) remains one of the classics of Central Brazilian botany, and over a hundred years on, this work is still of great relevance to ecologists, providing a sound initial understanding of the vegetation. Warming’s work provides a description of the vegetation of the region, and a list of 2,600 vascular plant species collected in an area of ca. 170 km², centred around the village. His collections were extremely useful for those involved in writing Martius’ Flora Brasiliensis. A Portuguese translation of his seminal cerrado work appeared in 1908 and was eventually expanded with more recent studies by the Brazilian ecologist Mario Guimarães Ferri in 1973 and re-published under co-authorship by the University São Paulo as Lagoa Santa – A Vegetação dos Cerrados Brasileiros.
On return to Europe, Warming continued his botanical and ecological studies and became professor at the Royal Institute of technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 1882.He became famous for his pioneering book Plantesamfund (1895), which established him as one of the founders of plant ecology and later appeared in English as Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities (1909).
ReferencesWarming, E. (1892). Lagoa Santa: Et bidrag til den biologiska plantegeograti. K. Danske Vitensk. Selsk. Skr. 6: 153-488.
Warming, E. & Ferri, M.G. (1973). Lagoa Santa e a Vegetação dos Cerrados Brasileiros. Ed. de Universidade de São Paulo e Ed. Itatiaia Ltda, Belo Horizonte, Brasil.