Resolution of Respect: Jerry S. Olson (1928–2021)

Jerry Olson (Photo 1) is a legend in the field of ecology. He is famous not only for his studies of succession, ecosystem ecology, systems ecology, and global ecology but also for his influence on the careers of many scientists. His passion for learning was remarkable. Those who knew him often tell stories about Jerry’s role in science, creativity, kindness, and absentmindedness (which seemed to be his idiosyncratic way to focus on important issues). Photo credit: Martha Cox. Jerry’s interest in ecology went back to his youth. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, and his curiosity about nature was encouraged by his parents, by the naturalist Orpheus Moyer Schantz, and by his teachers at Riverside, Illinois. This enthusiasm for the natural world was fostered by ready access to the nearby Forest Preserves of Cook County and Chicago's Museums and summers working on his grandparents’ farms in Iowa. Formal nature studies began as a high-school freshman, when Jerry hitchhiked to a wartime job filling in for departing service members at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, where he learned about "reading the landscape" from May Theilgaard Watts and enjoyed the books of Donald Culross Peattie. This background encouraged him to settle on ecology as his field of study. He became fascinated with sand dunes during family drives around Lake Michigan in the early 1940s. When he was a high-school student, Jerry had a job literally debugging vacuum tube computers, that is, removing the moths and other insects that collected on the hot tubes. This experience indirectly fueled his later interest in how computers could be used to understand ecological systems. Jerry was 16 when he started auditing classes in 1944 at the University of Chicago and 19 when he became a teaching assistant in the geology department. By age 23, he had received four degrees from the University of Chicago: Ph.B. in the College, 1947; B.S. and M.S. in Geology, 1948 and 1949; and Ph.D. in Botany in 1951. He gave credit to his outstanding professors at the University of Chicago for contributing to his knowledge in a wide variety of subjects that are basic to knowledge of ecological systems. His major professor was Charles Olmsted, who explored physiological ecology and relationships between vegetation and soils. Field trips with Olmsted's ecology class and J Harlen Bretz's geology class together with the University’s leadership in radiocarbon dating and Jerry’s interest in postglacial geology led to his work resulting in establishing a time scale for our current understanding of sand dune succession (Olson 1958). A semester spent with Hans Jenny and others in the Division of Soils and Plant Nutrition at Berkeley in 1950 aided the planning and analysis of Jerry’s study of soil-plant relations. In college, Jerry was a friend with James Watson, and they would go birding together. According to Jerry, Watson decided not to pursue his interest in ecology, which he felt was too complex. Instead, Watson moved into genetics where he worked with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin to determine the chemical structure of DNA. Jerry stuck with ecology and helped to disentangle some of its complexities using both traditional vegetation and soil sampling and new tools of modeling, tracer isotopes in nutrient- and energy-flow experiments, and geographic information systems. Jerry spent a year with the Committee on Statistics at Chicago, and in 1952, he went to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Connecticut, where he worked on germination and growth of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) for about 6 years. In 1958, after being recruited by Stanley Auerbach, Jerry accepted an appointment as geobotanist in the Ecology Section, Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he spent the rest of his career (Photo 2). His primary research interests there included the development of quantitative description of changing ecological systems and the movement of materials between plants and soils. He also trained students at the University of Tennessee in systems ecology under a grant from the Ford Foundation and encouraged others to join in developing this new field of study. Bob O’Neill told how, after his employment interview at ORNL, Jerry mailed him an envelope containing only a blank pad of paper. Bob interpreted this gift as an invitation to future creativity and decided to join the team of eminent ecologists at the Laboratory. Soon after moving to Oak Ridge, Jerry won the prestigious George Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America for the best academic paper by a young ecologist (Olson 1958)1 1 Presentation of the George Mercer Award in 1958 to Jerry Olson by Alvin Weinberg https://www.esa.org/history/Awards/bulletin/mercer1958.pdf . That study provided quantitative confirmation of Cowles (1899) speculation that “ecological succession … represents a variable approaching a variable rather than a constant." Sand dune ecology remained a passion throughout Jerry’s life. He pursued his interest in natural changes in the Indiana Dunes National Park over the course of seven decades even though he never had any funding for that work. Robert Washington-Allen accompanied Jerry into the field in 2016 and 2017, when he was 88 and 89, to remeasure his 1948 dissertation research plots using a terrestrial laser scanner (field lidar; Photo 3). Jerry quickly located the flagging on plots set out in 1951 having not visited the site in the intervening 65 years. Photo credit: Robert Washington-Allen. In 1962, Jerry received a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which was awarded to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." He used this award as an opportunity to travel with his family in Europe where he met with vegetation scientists and visited many sand dune landscapes. At ORNL, his research focused on interactions between plants and soils. His most influential paper, “Energy Storage and the Balance of Producers and Decomposers in Ecological Systems” published in 1963, was the first ecological study to use mathematical modeling for data interpretation. It is included in the 2016 Centennial Special of Notable Papers of the Ecological Society of America and continues to be highly cited—140 times in 2020 alone. For that study, Jerry compiled data on leaf litter production and forest floor carbon mass and provided an analysis of observed variation by estimating parameters for differential equations. This seminal idea is the basis of nearly all terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle models today. Students doing research on decomposition were thrilled to meet Jerry and put a face behind development of litter decomposition rates known as the “k constant.” Jerry performed carbon cycle simulations before there were digital computers available for general use. He worked with engineers in the Instrumentation and Controls Division at ORNL to build and use an analog computer system for developing the first ecosystem model simulations. Jerry also participated in the development of early whole ecosystem experiments. At ORNL, he and several colleagues began to study forest nutrient cycling in 1959. In a series of experiments, they injected radionuclides into trees and then tracked the radionuclides' subsequent movement. By assuming that radionuclides and nutrients circulate in similar ways, Olson inferred the movement of nutrients into the soil as litter decomposes, their subsequent uptake by trees, and their eventual return to the soil. A famous story about Jerry is that when attempting to insert strontium into a tree to trace nutrients flows in the ecosystem, he accidentally thrust the syringe into his hand instead of the tree. The health physicists at ORNL were able to treat him and monitor its transit through his body. That information, as analyzed by Muller and Thomas (1968), was useful after the Chernobyl disaster. In 1962, this nutrient cycling study was expanded by injecting cesium 137 into thirty-five tulip poplar trees (Liriodendron tulipifera). The “Cesium Forest” remained for several years as the focus of forest research at ORNL that documented the movement of cesium and provided information about nutrient cycling and primary and secondary productivity. Jerry was a major participant in H. T. Odum’s foundational ecological studies at the tropical forest experiment at El Verde, Puerto Rico. During the 1960s, he contributed unprecedented data on tropical rootstocks and nutrients (Ovington and Olson 1970). Jerry’s interest in ecological systems, along with his extensive travels, led to him being an early investigator in the field of global ecology. Jerry was one of the forces behind the establishment of the International Biological Program, which coordinated large-scale ecological and environmental studies around the globe between 1964 and 1974. Several people have heard Jerry reminisce about his trip to the Soviet Union to visit with collaborating scientists and go to one of the field sites. Upon arriving, he was interrogated by an enthusiastically suspicious KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Jerry was far ahead of most in his understanding of the role of the biosphere in the global carbon cycle. For years, he maintained and regularly updated a hand-drawn map of the vegetation of the world based on published regional maps from scientific investigations and communications with colleagues from around the globe. Ariel Lugo recalls that on their first meeting, Jerry “pulled out a global map full of notes and inserts and asked me to put biomass numbers on the map based on my knowledge of tropical forests.” Jerry communicated with scientists around the world regarding vegetation patterns and biomass in their vicinity. The first versions of his global carbon productivity maps show carbon productivity of the biosphere and carbon pools in the world’s biomes in a book edited by Dave Reichle (1970). After years of such queries and investigations into obscure publications, the resulting map and its associated documentation resulted in the first comprehensive estimate of the amount of carbon in the world’s terrestrial ecosystems (Olson et al. 1985a, b). Jerry participated in the influential Williamstown Study of Critical Environmental Problems (1970). One of the critical problems identified was rising atmospheric CO2, and a recommendation was made to conduct a systematic study of the partition of CO2 between the atmosphere, oceans, and biomass. Jerry became one of the first scientists to advocate for research into the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle and how it could respond to climate change (Baes et al. 1977). Linda Mann recalls in the 1980s looking at the first print map of the world's carbon storage as developed by Jerry and his colleagues and talking with him about carbon storage, carbon losses to the atmosphere, and global warming. She asked Jerry if he thought there was any chance trends could reverse and what could be done. His response was to say we should "hang on for the ride," implying that it was already too late. Interacting with Jerry on a project was both a blessing and a curse. As a mathematical modeler, he brought rigor, logic, and quantitative perspective to each study. However, Jerry spoke in “do loops.” That is, he started idea A, then brought up idea B, C, and D. He then closed idea D, then C, B, and A. Understanding how Jerry embedded many concepts in this communication made it much easier to understand Jerry’s interesting ideas. Dac Crossley has commented that, “If you could grab hold of one thread of his conversation and follow it through, you’d hear something significant.” Jerry was well known for his kindness as well as by his idiosyncrasies. Every spring, he would gather the first daffodil blooms on his farm and distribute them to everyone at work. Jerry was known for carrying a large briefcase or other bags everywhere he went, filled to the hilt. Bill Emanuel tells how George Van Dyne questioned whether Jerry ever accessed anything from his overstuffed bag and tested this by slipping a lead brick into the bottom of the bag. The story is that Jerry carried that bag, lead brick and all, without noticing the added weight for a year or more. Eventually, while walking through the Moscow airport, the lead brick fell through the bottom of the bag to the airport floor. Bernie Patten’s "heavy-bag" story took place in Tbilisi, Georgia, where Jerry tried to get Bernie to transport back to the USA a large duffle bag full of books that could hardly be lifted. Jerry’s personal life was full. He met his first wife, the former Margaret Ford, at the university and they married in 1950. Their daughters, Karen and Martha, were born in Connecticut when Jerry worked for the state agricultural experiment station. Marge’s assistance is acknowledged in several of Jerry’s publications, for she shared his enthusiasm for the environment, and as a librarian, her organizational skills helped him sort out his many notes and records. Rich Norby recalls that when Jerry could not put his hands on an article in the middle of one of many tall stacks of paper in his office, he would declare it was “lost in the stratigraphy.” After his first marriage ended in divorce, in 1984 Jerry married the former Betty Lee Settlemyer at the mouth of Eblen Cave near their Roane County farm. Jerry and Betty’s wedding was memorable. They walked into the cave and dipped champagne glasses into the creek to collect water used to toast their marriage. The following reception was like many subsequent gatherings on their farm that were highlighted by good food, stimulating conversations, and lively music while guests looked over the adjacent field to what Jerry called his “view cows” (which belonged to his neighbor). Jerry passed away ten days after Betty died on Dec. 26, 2020. Jerry was active in a cultural group called Vikings of the Smokies and attended the Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church. He was an early advocate of the work of Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning and enjoyed riding horses, participating in ecological conferences, and propagating dawn redwood seedlings for distribution to friends. An avid music lover, he often attended concerts of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and bluegrass jams at the Bradbury Community Club near his Roane County farm. Jerry retired from ORNL in 1985 but remained active with writing, teaching, and research with publications as recently as 2018. He and Betty enjoyed traveling to meetings of the Ecological Society of America (Photo 4). He often attended seminars at ORNL and astounded students with his knowledge-often expressing great interest in their projects. Even in his later years, he often came up with innovative ideas for new research and was interested in working with colleagues to seek funding. Virginia Dale remembers the Christmas Eve when Jerry dropped by her house unexpectedly with a proposal that "had to be submitted the next day." Photo credit: Ed Johnson. Jerry’s exceptional scientific innovations and out-of-the-box thinking were a challenge and inspiration to everyone with whom he interacted and collaborated. He was known for his positive outlook, optimism, and treating everyone with dignity and respect. Combined with his passion for learning, his ideas influenced the careers of many scientists. His unusual combination of eccentricity, kindness, and brilliance made him uniquely loveable. We appreciate contributions, corrections, and memories shared by Dac Crossley, Bill Emanuel, Ed Johnson, Ariel Lugo, Linda Mann, Bernie Patten, Dave Reichle, Hank Shugart, Ellen Smith, Larry Voorhees, Robert Washington-Allen, and Stan Wullschleger.