At the end of a rough year, losing two of our greatest naturalists, Tom Lovejoy and then Ed Wilson the next day, seems pretty unfair. Both of them produced science that remains important. A thread.
Biogeography was largely a descriptive field before Robert MacArthur and Wilson created the Equilibrium Theory. It has been fashionable to beat up on its assumptions. But that misses the point. It was a new way of looking at the world that remains fundamental.
Instead of just cataloguing who lived where or defining the boundaries of communities, it might be possible to make predictions. Who is there changes over time – biogeography is dynamic! Local extinction needs to be balanced by arrivals if a species is to remain on a landscape
Even more important: Islands aren’t just islands. They are common because nature is heterogeneous and because humanity is busy making islands where there were none – and that will matter. Modern conservation science emerges from this insight.
Lovejoy is among the first to be inspired by the new way of looking at ecological systems. After working with birds in the Amazon rainforest, watching it being destroyed, he proposed an experiment which seems incredibly ambitious >40 years later.
He worked with local ranchers to coordinate one of the first landscape scale experiments on patch size and fragmentation. They cleared forest around a set of patches that vary in size. 
The experiment showed, and continues to show, that fragmenting rainforest caused species to go extinct. The experiment is still going and we continue to learn from it. This basic design has been used hundreds of times since.
Both the equilibrium theory and the experiment in the Amazon were new ways of thinking about and learning from nature. Both, from their inception, were deemed to be important to understanding how humans are affecting nature.
The path this work put us on continues to be critical. Modern conservation science has built on the foundation these folks provided and is better at ever in helping us navigate the challenge of conserving species and ecosystems.
Sidebar: In the background is a fantastic scientist who gets less airtime these days: Evelyn Hutchinson. He was the PhD advisor of both Robert MacArthur and Tom Lovejoy. His approach to ecology, melding quantitative approaches and field data, inspired both of them.
As for so many, there is a personal side for me. I knew Ed Wilson, but not well. In Tom Lovejoy, I lost a friend. He served for many years on the @yalepeabody board. I will miss his wise and patient advice and his absolutely relentless optimism.
For someone who spent decades watching the sausage get made, it inspires me no end that Tom believed that we will figure it out. The human enterprise will coexist with the rest of the millions of species on this planet. /end
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