2 Springer authors win important awards from the Ecological Society of America

Monica Turner and Stuart Chapin honored for their contributions and research in ecology

The Springer authors Monica Turner and Stuart Chapin will receive two prestigious awards from the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Turner is the winner of this year's Robert H. MacArthur Award presented for outstanding ecological achievement. Chapin is given the Sustainability Science Award for his paper "Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate". He shares the honor with Terry Yates, who posthumously receives the award. The awards will be presented to Turner and Chapin at ESA's 93rd Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on August 4, 2008.

Monica Turner, professor of ecology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is one of the founders of the discipline of landscape ecology. Her seminal publications on the subject led to the first comprehensive textbook on landscape ecology, Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice which she published together with Robert Gardner and Robert O'Neill at Springer in 2001. Moreover, her work in Yellowstone National Park explores the long-term vegetation dynamics in the context of changing fire regimes, grazing by elk, and the complex interactions of plant roots, soil, microbes and nitrogen.

Turner is one of the editors-in-chief of the Springer journal Ecosystems. She is also co-editor of several other Springer books such as Ecosystem Function in Heterogeneous Landscapes (2005), Learning Landscape Ecology (first edition in 2002) and Quantitative Methods in Landscape Ecology: The Analysis and Interpretation of Landscape Heterogeneity (first edition in 1991).