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BRITISH ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY PRESS RELEASE

6 November 2006

British Ecological Society President wins 2006 ecology “Oscar”

Professor Sir John Lawton, president of the British Ecological Society and Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has won this year's prestigious Ramon Margalef Ecology and Environmental Sciences Award. The award is given by the Catalan Government for outstanding contributions to the science of ecology, and is the most valuable prize in this discipline in the world.

Few ecologists in the world have Professor Sir John Lawton's breadth and depth of understanding of the natural world. Lawton's internationally-renowned work on insect-plant interactions, community structure and more recently on the impact of global change on populations and communities of organisms have made a major contribution to ecology. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in ecology for his work with large, controlled environment facilities, such as Imperial College London's Ecotron, which have addressed some of today's most pressing environmental issues in a way that is often impossible in field experiments.

Reacting to the award, which will be presented at a ceremony in Barcelona on 14 November, Lawton said: “I am greatly humbled to have been awarded the Ramon Margalef Prize. It is the equivalent of an Oscar for life-time achievement in a science that I love, and for which I never expected anything other than the joy, excitement and frustration of trying to understand the way 'nature' works. I am extremely grateful to my peers for selecting me for this second Margalef Prize, and for the awarding committee and the Catalan Government for recognising the importance of the science of ecology, in a way that Margalef would have truly approved.”

The Catalan Government created the award in 2005 to celebrate Ramon Margalef, one of Catalonia's leading scientists and one of the founding fathers of the modern science of ecology.

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Notes for editors

1. For more information, contact Becky Allen, Press Officer, British Ecological Society, tel: 01223 570016, mob: 07949 804317, email: beckyallen@ntlworld.com.

2. Professor Sir John Lawton has written more than 320 scientific papers, articles and chapters of books on ecology. Educated at the University of Durham, Lawton was Professor of Ecology at the University of York until 1989, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council from 1999 to 2005 and Chairman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) from 1993 to 1998, where he was instrumental in establishing the RSPB's current reserve strategy of creating large, landscape-level reserves. As well as being president of the British Ecological Society and Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Lawton is also a Vice President of the British Trust for Ornithology and a Trustee of WWF UK.

Ramon Margalef was a world expert in limnology (the study of lakes), marine biology and oceanography. Born in Barcelona in 1919, his education was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War when he was recruited to the Republican Army in 1938. After military service he toured Spain on a motorbike, with a hand-built microscope, searching for biological specimens. He worked at the Barcelona Institute of Applied Biology from 1946 to 1951, at the Fisheries Research Institute (now the Institute of Sea Sciences) from 1949 to 1967 and in the late 1960s turned down an invitation to head the UN International Institute of Oceanography because he was happier working in research. He was Spain's first professor of ecology, at the University of Barcelona, and although he retired in 1987 he continued to work in his laboratory until his death in 2004.

3. The British Ecological Society is a learned society, a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee. Established in 1913 by academics to promote and foster the study of ecology in its widest sense, the Society has 4,000 members in the UK and abroad. Further information is available at www.britishecologicalsociety.org.

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