A second major influence on Curtis at this time was the work of Henry Gleason who had tried to challenge earlier narrow use of the term "plant association" as an "organic and self-reproducing" field entity. The term, as used then, greatly inhibited ecologists' potential to understand and integrate the dynamics of species and populations into communities. Gleason had promoted use of the term "individualistic" for the composition of plant communities (Gleason 1926), but leaders in plant ecology in the1920s and 1930s trivialized his idea and forced him to leave ecology. (Gleason then focused his energies on plant systematics, where he found acceptance and lifelong success.) John Curtis corresponded with Gleason in the early 1940s and got copies of his papers. Curtis knew Gleason had been right, and knew also that he would have to have extensive data if he was to win what became known as the "continuum" battle through studies of the vegetation of Wisconsin. By the late 1950s, the Plant Ecology Laboratory housed all the remaining reprints of Gleason's ecology papers.
John Curtis's plan for a systematic study of vegetation throughout Wisconsin emerged in 1946-47. It was partly an extension of his proposal for studies of the "Great Lakes Forest of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ontario," a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship project that was to start in September 1942 (see Burgess 1993), but which was interrupted by the war work in Haiti. By 1946-47, Curtis saw that continuing financial support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) could be arranged for graduate students, the returning WWII veterans. Numerous students were applying, including Forest Stearns, Grant Cottam, Bob McIntosh, Phil Whitford, and Robert Brown. Each of these worked on quite different questions, but each also emphasized a quantitative, hypothesis-testing or experimental approach whenever possible. Consistent with John Curtis's background as an experiment-oriented plant scientist, students and faculty readily accepted the term "Laboratory" for the ideas and expected 10 years of Wisconsin vegetation data.
Left to right; Grant Cottam, Paul Sears, John T. Curtis
Although all the earliest students worked on forests or forest herbs, John Curtis's true love, personally, was the prairies. Here, species identification was often beyond the capabilities of new graduate students, and understanding the effects of historical treatment (or, in the case of fire, the absence of treatment) required an innovative, field experimental approach. A second cohort of graduate students such as David Archbald, Max Partch, John Butler, Orlin Anderson, and Bonita Neiland, eventually took on these grassland questions. Other students quantified relationships among soil-fungal, aquatic macrophyte, and lichen communities. Grant Cottam joined the group as an Assistant Professor in 1950 to add strengths in statistics and sampling methods. As reported by Cottam (1993), Curtis, and a few colleagues tried to spend one day every week in the field, looking for new study sites and taking data for the prairie continuum studies.
From the beginning, the Plant Ecology Laboratory was an institution that integrated a dual rationale: a physical place for study and data files, and a body of accumulated theory and understanding about how species relate to the natural environments of a region. Curtis wanted this knowledge to improve human use and enjoyment of those landscapes.