Russian botanist at the Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Sukaczev (or Sukachev) had a broad range of interests spanning taxonomy, genetics, forest ecology and plant geography and his fieldwork centred on the Baikal region. Born in Aleksandrovka he studied at the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute and, graduating in 1902, began to work at the vascular plant herbarium of the Botanical Museum. During this period he conducted fieldwork in Baikal with colleague G.I. Poplavskaya (1912-1918). Sukaczev held many professorships at different institutions from 1919, including chair of dendrology and plant systematics at the Forestry Institute (which he held until 1941), professor at the Geographic Institute (1919-1925), the Botanical Garden (1924-1933) and at St. Petersburg University (1925-1941).
Following this Sukaczev moved to Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) to the Urals Forestry Institute but only remained there for a few years before moving to Moscow in 1944 to organise its Institute of Forestry, which he directed for many years. His professorship at the Moscow Timber Technology Institute (1944-1948) overlapped for several years his work at the Moscow State University (1946-1953), and here he led the group of biogeocoenology. Sukaczev popularised this word as an alternative to what we might think of as ecology, which in Russia had a much more restricted meaning.
His most important contribution to botany is almost certainly Fundamentals of Forest Biogeocoenology, published posthumously in 1968. This work focused on ecosystems with an emphasis on managed forests, describing patterns of change, although he rejects the concept of a fixed climax community. He advocates the use of the term biogeocoenology as superior to ecology in this context and describes the subtle difference between the two terms. In 1915 Sukaczev was a founding member of the Russian Botanical Society and in 1946 he also came to preside over the society for 17 years. He led the 7th International Botanical Congress in Stockholm in 1950 and edited both the Botanicheskiy Zhurnal and the Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Naturalists.
Sources:
C.F. Cooper, 1968, "Sukachev's Last testament", Ecology, 49(6): 1216-1217
S.G. Shetler, 1967, The Komarov Botanical Institute
Sukachev, Vladimir Nikolaevich (Russia 1880-1967), Chrono-Biographical Sketches, Western Kentucky University:
http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/SUKA1880.htm, accessed 21 December 2010.
