Post provided by Anthony Ives

It was a true privilege to be asked to write the inaugural E. C. Pielou Review for Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The first ecology book I bought as an undergraduate was her Ecological Diversity (1975) which still sits on my bookshelf full of marginalia. Both ecology and evolution have long and rich histories of theoretical and empirical work, yet sometimes theory and observation have been only loosely connected. Pielou’s work made it possible to link theory and observation more tightly by providing quantitative, statistical metrics to describe patterns in the world that can be related back to theory.