quality:corruption, structural:expansion
Plantesamfund ('Oecology of plants')

The book Plantesamfund was based on Warming's lectures on plant geography at the University of Copenhagen. It gives an introduction to all major biomes of the world. Warming's aim, and his major lasting impact on the development of ecology, was to explain how nature solved similar problems (drought, flooding, cold, salt, herbivory, etc.) in similar way, despite using very different ‘raw material’ (species of different origin) in different regions of the world. This was a remarkably modern view—completely different from the merely descriptive floristic plant geography prevailing during his time.

The subtitle alludes to the title of the book Grundtræk af den almindelige Plantegeografi, published in 1822 (German edn 1823: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Pflanzengeographie) by J. F. Schouw, co-founder of the scientific phytogeography.

Plantesamfund was translated to German in 1896 as

A second, unauthorized, edition was issued during 1902 by Paul Graebner, who put his own name after Warming's on the book's frontispiece, despite no changes to the contents.

This edition was expanded in third and fourth editions:

A Polish translation of ’Plantesamfund’ (from Knoblauch's German translation) appeared in 1900:

Two independent Russian (Moscow and St. Petersburg) editions appeared in 1901 and 1903

An extended and translated edition in English first appeared in 1909:

The German ecologist A. F. W. Schimper published Pflanzengeographie auf physiologisher Grundlage in 1898.

This work not only covered much of the same ground as Warming did in 1895 and 1896 but in fact also leaned heavily on Warming’s research. Schimper (1898) quoted extensively from more than 15 of Warming’s works and even reproduced Warming’s figures. Yet nowhere did Schimper acknowledge his profound debt to Warming, neither in the list of picture credits, nor in the acknowledgements section of the Vorwort, nor in his list of major sources, and not even in a footnote!... Although replete with Warming’s data, it contains few ideas and did not advance ecology beyond what Warming had done earlier.