XVI International Botanical Congess

Botany at 1900 was forced to accommodate two new disciplines (evolutionary biology and ecology), whose application in the botanical sciences was not immediately apparent. A century of economic botany and biogeographical studies had provided an empirical base for the new theories, but no practical advice for implementing them. Simultaneously, institutional changes in the organization of agricultural sciences in the North America and Europe helped create new bases from which to do ecology and new tensions between applied and theoretical botanists. From these combined challenges arose many of the modern environmental and genetic sciences.