Tikhon Alexandrovich Rabotnov (Ти́хон Алекса́ндрович Рабо́тнов; 6 July 1904 – 16 September 2000) was a Russian plant ecologist. He was professor and head of the Department of Geobotany at Moscow State University until 1981. He was a father figure to generations of Russian plant ecologists. He conducted ground breaking studies in the regeneration of natural plant communities – studies which remained largely overlooked in the West.
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He was born in Yaroslavl and graduated from the Agronomy Department of the University of Yaroslavl' in 1924, he obtained his PhD in 1936 and a ’habilitation’ for a professorship in 1950. He worked at the State Institute of Grassland Research for more than 40 years, while lecturing plant ecology at Moscow State University.
Selected scientific work
edit- The life cycle of perennial herbaceous plants in meadow coenoses. Trudy Botaničeskogo Instituta im. V.L. Komarova, Akademiya nauk SSSR. Ser.3: Geobotanika 6: 7-204. 1950 (in Russian).
- Peculurities of the structure of polydominant meadow communities. Vegetatio 13: 109-116. 1966.
- On coenopoulations of perennial herbaceous plants in natural coenoses. Vegetatio 19: 87-95. 1969.
- Plant regeneration from seed in meadows of the USSR. Herbage Abstracts 39, 269-277. 1969.
- Consortia, the importance of their study for phyto-coenology. Folia Geobotanica et Phytotaxonomica 7: 1-8. 1972.
- Rabotnov, T.A. & Demin, A.P. Effect of longterm fertilization on the underground parts of meadow plants and phytocoenoses. In: Second International Symposium on Ecology and Physiology of Root Systems, pp. 243–246. 1974. Berlin.
- On phytocoenotypes. Phytocoenologia 2: 66-72. 1975.
- Structure and method of studying coenotic populations of perennial herbaceous plants. Soviet Journal of Ecology, 9, 99-105. 1978.
- On some problems of the coevolution of organisms. Phytocoenologia 7: 1-7. 1980.
- Importance of the evolutionary approach to the study of allelopathy. Soviet Journal of Ecology 12: 127-130. 1982.
- Phytocoenology, 3rd ed. Izd. Moskva Univ., Moskva. 1992 (in Russian). Translated to German as *Phytozönologie: Struktur und Dynamik natürlicher Ökosysteme. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart. 1995.
- Dynamics of plant coenotic populations. In: White. J. (ed.) The population structure of vegetation, pp. 121–142. Junk, Dordrecht. 1985.
- On ecological niche of plants. Russian Journal of Ecology 26: 221-222. 1995.
Rabotnov founded and edited the still ongoing Biological Flora of the Moscow Region from volume 1 (1974) to his death (vol 8, 1990).
- For contents in Russian - see [1]
- For contents in English (by 1996) - see Poschlod, P. et al. (1996) The biological flora of Central Europe: an ecological bibliography. Bulletin of the Geobotanical Institute ETH 62: 89-108.