Who laid the concept of Biome ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), F. Clements (1916). The American plant ecologist Frederic E. Clements proposed the term 'biome' in 1916, the same year as his major work on plant succession, and the idea was developed further in Bio-Ecology, which he wrote with the animal ecologist Victor Shelford in 1939. The point of the term was integration. Plant ecologists at the time worked with the plant formation, animal ecologists with the animal community, and the two were studied separately; the biome was proposed as the larger unit that takes in both — a major regional community of plants and animals together, occupying a broad climatic zone and identified by its dominant vegetation type. Tropical rainforest, savanna, desert, temperate grassland, temperate deciduous forest, boreal forest and tundra are biomes in this sense. The question is a straight attribution, and it is best answered by the elimination that the other three names invite, because each of them is attached to a different landmark and, as printed here, to an impossible date. A.G. Tansley coined the term 'ecosystem', and he did so in 1935; he died in 1955, so no work of his can carry the date printed against his name in option (3). Ernst Haeckel coined the word 'ecology' — Oekologie — in 1866, and he died in 1919, so the date printed in option (4) cannot belong to him either, quite apart from the misspelling of his name. Neither Tansley nor Haeckel is associated with the biome in any case: one gave ecology the ecosystem and the other gave it its name. That leaves Clements, whose entire body of work was about vegetation units, succession and the climatic climax, and to whom the concept properly belongs.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A pair of names with no standard claim to the coining of 'biome' in any history of ecology, and a date that attaches to no landmark in the naming of the concept. The option works as a distractor precisely because the names are unfamiliar: a candidate who does not recognise them may assume they belong to a specialist literature that he has simply not read, and prefer them over the familiar names for that reason. Unfamiliarity is not evidence, and in an attribution question the safer move is to eliminate the names whose actual contributions are known.  (c) Arthur G. Tansley's contribution is the ecosystem, a term he introduced in 1935 for the unit comprising organisms together with the whole complex of physical factors forming their environment. It is a different concept from the biome, defined on a different basis — functional interaction rather than regional vegetation type — and at a different scale. The printed date compounds the error: Tansley died in 1955, so 1974 cannot mark any work of his. This is the most attractive wrong option because Tansley is the name most strongly associated with foundational ecological concepts.  (d) Ernst Haeckel, whose name is misspelt here, gave ecology its name — he coined Oekologie in 1866 for the study of the relations of organisms to their environment. He was a nineteenth-century zoologist and morphologist and died in 1919, so the date of 1933 printed against him is impossible; nor did he propose any regional vegetation unit. A candidate who recognises Haeckel as a founding figure of ecology and stops there will be drawn to this option, when the correct association is with the discipline's name rather than with any of its later units.

Concept: A biome is a major regional ecological unit, defined by the dominant type of vegetation and by the animal life adapted to it, and controlled principally by climate — above all by the combination of temperature and precipitation. The same biome therefore recurs in widely separated parts of the world wherever the climate is similar: tropical rainforest in the Amazon, the Congo and Southeast Asia; savanna in East Africa, the Brazilian campos and northern Australia; Mediterranean scrub in California, Chile, the Cape and around the Mediterranean itself. Biomes sit in a hierarchy of ecological units that is worth keeping straight: the individual organism, the population, the community, the ecosystem, which adds the physical environment as a functioning whole, the biome as a regional grouping of similar ecosystems, and the biosphere as the sum of all of them. The biome is thus a vegetation-and-climate concept, while the ecosystem is a functional concept that can be applied at any scale — a pond, a field or a forest — which is why the two terms have different authors and different dates.

State PCS 2026 Q35 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q35 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer