J. Philip Grime

John Philip Grime FRS is a prominent British ecologist and emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield. He is best known for his CSR theory on plant strategies, for the unimodal relationship between species richness and site productivity (the "humped-back model"), for the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, for the DST classification (dominants, subordinates and transients) and, with Simon Pierce (University of Milan, Italy), universal adaptive strategy theory (UAST) and the twin filter model of community assembly and eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Grime's 1979 book Plant Strategies and Vegetation Processes has been cited more than 1,200 times. Together with many influential scientific papers, it has made him a highly cited scientist. In an interview Grime has stated that "Ecology lacks a Periodic Table", quoting Richard Southwood.

He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Sheffield in 1960 and joined the staff of the Department of Botany in 1961. He worked at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, U.S. from 1963 to 1964. He then returned to the University of Sheffield and joined the Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology, which had been founded in 1961 by professor Ian H. Rorison. Grime served as deputy director of the unit 1964–1989 and as director from 1989.

His work and his theories are focused on plant strategies, as developed along their evolutionary history. His CSR theory says that each plant species has a blend of the three strategies that he labels C (competitive), S (stress tolerant) and R (ruderal, or rapid propagation). Ruderal strategists thrive in disturbed areas. He has described a method to classify herbaceous vegetations by analyzing the importance of the three strategies in the genotypes of the species that are present.

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