Eugene Odum

Eugene Pleasants Odum was born on 17 September 1913 in Newport, New Hampshire, and died on 10 August 2002 in Athens, Georgia. He joined the University of Georgia's Department of Zoology in 1940 and remained there for the rest of his career, helping found the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the University of Georgia Marine Institute. His 1953 textbook Fundamentals of Ecology, written with his brother Howard T. Odum, popularized the term ecosystem and treated it as the basic unit of nature whose properties are greater than the sum of its parts; translated into a dozen languages, it dominated the training of American ecologists for a generation. In 1964, as president of the Ecological Society of America, Odum announced the establishment of systems ecology, a program for studying whole ecosystems as integrated systems.