Professor Ramon Margalef (1919-2004)

• Autores: Joan Domènec Ros
• Localización: Contributions to Science, ISSN-e 1575-6343, Vol. 3, Nº. 2, 2006, págs. 297-317
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • Ramon Margalef, Professor Emeritus of Ecology of the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, and member for the Institute for Catalan Studies, passed away at age 85 on May 23, 2004. Margalef was the most important Catalan and Spanish limnologist, marine biologist, and ecologist of the twentieth century. He was a pioneer and outstanding researcher in these fields; and he contributed greatly to many branches of science, ranging from limnology and biological oceanography to theoretical ecology. Margalef has left us an enormous body of scientific literature, consisting of more than 400 published scientific papers and 20 scientific books. Even though not all of his papers were published in journals included in the Science Citation Index, for many years he was the most frequently cited Spanish scientist. In a list of 95 investigators from around the world, Margalef was considered to be one of the three most outstanding Spanish life scientists ­the other two being Nobel Prize winners Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852­1934) and Severo Ochoa (1905­1993). Margalef's book Perspectives in Ecological Theory (1968) and his articles "On certain unifying principles in ecology" (1963), "Life-forms of phytoplankton as survival alternatives in an unstable environment" (1978), and "From hydrodynamic processes to structure (information) and from information to process" (1985) are classics regarding their citations by other authors. In particular, "On certain unifying principles in ecology" is considered to be among the top ten articles of twentieth-century biology.