Shelford, Victor Ernest

Victor Ernest Shelford, (born Sept. 22, 1877, Chemung, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 27, 1968), American zoologist and animal ecologist whose pioneering studies of animal communities helped to establish ecology as a distinct discipline. His Animal Communities in Temperate America (1913) was one of the first books to treat ecology as a separate science.

Shelford was educated at the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1907) and spent most of his career at the University of Illinois. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America (1916).

In 1933 Shelford began a study at the University of Illinois of the correlations between population changes of animals and environmental changes. He made many reports on cyclic changes in animal populations. With Frederic E. Clements in 1939 he published Bio-ecology, in which he developed the concept of the biome for the predominant vegetation, with its animal inhabitants, that characterizes a large geographic area. His well-known book The Ecology of North America (1963) summarized the major biomes, which include tundra, coniferous forest, deciduous forest, grassland, and desert. Shelford was particularly influential in establishing the use of experimental methods in the study of animal ecology.