Leonty Ramensky

Who was Leonty Ramensky?

Leonty Grigoryevich Ramensky was a Russian plant ecologist who conceived several important ideas that were overlooked in the West and later ’re-invented’ by western scientists.

He graduated from the Petrograd University in 1916 and obtained a Ph.D. in biology in 1935. From 1911 to 1928 he worked in the Research Institute of the Voronezh Gouvernement and from 1928 in the State Grassland Institute. Ramensky was a proponent of the view that biotic communities consist of species behaving individualistically. This was in strong contrast to the prevailing view of communities as super-organisms, held by the powerful V.N.Sukachov and his consorts. Hence, Ramensky was marginalized within the Russian scientific community and was only posthumously rehabilitated by Russian ecologists. Much later, the significance of his ideas was discovered by ecologists in the West.