BUCYRUS -- The late Paul B. Sears, a Bucyrus, Ohio native, was honored on the 119th anniversary of his birth by the Ohio Academy of Science in its Dec. 17, 2010 issue of The Ohio Journal of Science.

Sears (1891-1990) has long been considered one of the foremost biologists in Ohio history.
According to the academy, he was an internationally known researcher, a pioneer in the science of ecology and a leader in the analysis of pollen from lake and bog deposits to infer pre-historic climate change decades before climate-change research became popular.

"Paul Sears had a huge influence during his lifetime, but his legacy simply grows ever larger with the importance of his research on climate-change studies," said Ohio Academy of Science Chief Executive Officer Lynn Elfner.

The Sears State Nature Preserve, 1486 Mount Zion Road, Bucyrus, Ohio was named for his family, and is part of the Crawford Park District.

The magazine's story looks at Sears as a scientist and scholar, a teacher and as a family man. It includes his early years growing up in Crawford County, Ohio, his education at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he earned bachelor's degrees in zoology and economics; the University of Nebraska where he received a master's in botany; and the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in botany.

"Sears was innovative and pollen research, once esoteric, is bedrock biological analysis now," said Ronald L. Stuckey, professor emeritus of Botany at The Ohio State University.

Stuckey was one of 12 contributors to the special edition of The Ohio Journal of Science. Other contributors include Sears' daughters, Catherine Sears Frazer and Sallie Harris Sears.

Before Sears, scientists worked in discrete areas of biology, chemistry, geology and physics apart from each other. But Sears' career came as scientific advances began to blur those lines. Sears, along with other scientists, such as Aldo Leopold, was among the first to study biology from the standpoint of other disciplines to learn how the environment, plants and animals, including human beings, interact and affect one another.

"Delving into that interaction is not only basic to climate change research and understanding and predicting our immediate environment, but also to understanding how the global environment may change in the next century," Stuckey said.

Sears was a pioneer in the study of plant pollen preserved in ancient sediments of lakes and bogs to learn what plants grew in an area pre-historically and then to deduce other factors such as what the environment and climate were like. He knew that understanding the environment on a small scale could lead to global reconstruction.

Early in his research career, Sears was interested in understanding how large areas of prairie developed in Ohio following the retreat of the glaciers. Discovered in the Yale Library and Archives, and published for the first time, is a 1919 sketch map of Ohio's original prairies.

As a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, Sears wrote "Deserts on the March," the best-known of many books that popularized ecology. In 1950, he moved from Oberlin College to Yale University to found Yale's conservation-studies program, the first department of its kind in the nation.

During his career, Sears served as president of the Ohio, Oklahoma and Nebraska academies of science as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sears published his first scientific paper in "The Ohio Naturalist and Journal of Science" in December, 1914. During his long career he published works in more than 500 publications.

Sears retired to New Mexico in the 1960s, where he continued his interest in ecology, He died at Taos, N.M., in 1990.