Henry Chandler Cowles

Henry Chandler Cowles (1869 to 1939) was an American botanist and ecological pioneer, a professor at the University of Chicago who studied ecological succession in the Indiana Dunes of Northwest Indiana, work that led to efforts to preserve the dunes. Born in Kensington, Connecticut, he attended Oberlin College in Ohio and studied at the University of Chicago with the plant taxonomist John M. Coulter and the geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin. He obtained his PhD in 1898 for his study of vegetation succession on the Lake Michigan sand dunes, inspired by reading Plantesamfund by the Danish botanist and ecologist Eugen Warming. Cowles studied Danish to read the original and in 1905 visited Warming in Copenhagen. One of his students, O. D. Frank, continued his research.