Guide to the Robert Harding Whittaker Papers,
[ca. 1940-1984]

Robert H. Whittaker received a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from Washburn Municipal University in Topeka, Kansas in 1942, served in the Army Air Force as a weather observer and forecaster in England until 1946, and received a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Illinois in 1948. In 1948, he was appointed as an instructor in the Dept. of Zoology at Washington State College in Pullman. He worked for the Aquatic Biology Unit at the Hanford Laboratories of the General Electric Company, taught at Brooklyn College and at the University of California at Irvine, and at Cornell University. He spent two years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, served as American editor of the journal Vegetatio; was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and served as vice president of the Ecological Society of America and president of the American Society of Naturalists. Robert H. Whittaker died on October 20, 1980.

Collection includes research data, course notebooks, manuscripts, and letters of Dr. Robert H. Whittaker. Projects documented include field work on the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon and California; an effort to obtain measurements of the biomass and productivity of the forest communities along an elevation gradient in the Great Smokey Mountains; with William Niering, a gradient analysis and productivity study of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona; a study with George M. Woodwell at the Brookhaven National Laboratory about the Brookhaven and Hubbard Brook oak-pine forest; and on California vegetation in the San Jacinto Mountains. In 1968, Whittaker accepted a position as Professor of Biology in the Dept. of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University. While at Cornell, his projects included a study of production, nutrient circulation, and ordination of the vegetable gradient from the pygmy forest through the Bishop pine forest to the redwoods in Mendocino County, Calif., with Walter Westman; continued work on primary production for the Hubbard Brook forest and the Santa Catalina Mountains; and work on species diversity in Nylsvely, South Africa.