Grime joined the staff of the department of
botany at Sheffield in 1961. He worked at the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, US from 1963 to 1964. He then returned to the
University of Sheffield and joined the unit of comparative
plant ecology, which had been founded in 1961 by professor Ian H. Rorison. Grime served as deputy director of the Natural Environmental Research Council Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology from 1964 to 1989 and as director from 1989.
Plant strategies His work and his theories are focused on plant strategies, as developed along their evolutionary history. His CSR theory says that each plant species has a blend of the three strategies that he labels
C (competitive),
S (stress tolerant) and
R (ruderal, or rapid propagation). Ruderal strategists thrive in disturbed areas. He has described a method to classify herbaceous vegetations by analysing the importance of the three strategies in the genotypes of the species that are present.
Selected publications •
The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems •
Plant Strategies and Vegetation Processes •
Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes, and Ecosystem Properties. (2nd much expanded edition of the above) •
Benefits of plant diversity to ecosystems: immediate, filter and founder effects • "Trait convergence and trait divergence in herbaceous plant communities: mechanisms and consequencesre" • "Plant strategy theories: a comment on Craine"
Awards and honours In 1991, Grime was inducted as a foreign member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997, he won the Marsh Ecology Award from the
British Ecological Society and was awarded honorary membership of the
Ecological Society of America. He was also Distinguished Visiting Ecologist at
Pennsylvania State University in that year. In 1998, he was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and
honorary doctor at
University of Nijmegen. He has been honorary member of the
British Ecological Society since 1999. He was the first ever recipient of the
Alexander von Humboldt Medal (2011) for his outstanding contribution to the intellectual development of plant community ecology. In 2013, the
Journal of Ecology published a collection of Grime's most influential papers, for which he wrote a blog post and recorded an accompanying
podcast interview. ==References==