Emma Lucy Braun

E. Lucy Braun (April 19, 1889 – March 5, 1971) was a prominent botanist, ecologist, and expert on the forests of the eastern United States.

Life

Emma Lucy Braun was born in 1889 in Cincinnati; she lived in Cincinnati for the remainder of her life. She studied botany and geology. She earned a PhD in botany and became the second woman to earn a PhD from the University of Cincinnati; her sister Annette Braun was the first. Braun went on to teach ecology at the University of Cincinnati; she retired from teaching to focus on her research. She also conducted extensive field studies with her sister who was an entomologist. They purchased a car in 1930 and used to travel around the East Coast studying the environment and Emma took hundreds of photographs of the natural flora. These field studies mainly focused on the flora of the Appalachian Mountains and largely contributed to her most famous book. Emma and her sister encountered moonshiners during their field studies, although they never turned anyone in, and became friends with the locals in order to explore the forests. They also set-up a laboratory and experimental garden at their shared home; she was never married. Emma Braun also fought to conserve natural areas and set-up nature reserves, particularly in her home state. She began pressing flowers while in high school and eventually collected an extensive herbarium which eventually resided in the National Museum in Washington D.C.

Research

Over the whole duration of her career, Emma Braun wrote four books and 180 articles published in over twenty journals. Her most famous work was her book Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, which was published in 1950. Francis Fosberg said of her book “one can only say that it is a definitive work, and that it has reached a level of excellence seldom or never before attained in American ecology or vegetation science, at least in any work of comparable importance.” Braun developed a program to research vascular plant floristics and deciduous forests. She founded the Wildflower Preservation Society of North America. As a professor she had thirteen MA students and one PhD student, nine of which were women; the mentorship of these students was very uncommon for female professors during her time. • In 1943, she published An Annotated Catalog of Spermatophytes. • In 1955, she published The Phytogeography of Unglaciated Eastern United States and Its Interpretation. • In the 1960s she published The Woody Plants of Ohio and The Monocotyledoneae: Cat-tails to Orchids. She studied the flora in particular areas and then compared her findings with the flora from a century earlier. She influenced the process by which regional changes in flora were analyzed over time.

Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

Emma Braun was a strong feminist figure in the scientific world. She was the first female officer, as Vice President, and eventually the first President of the Ecological Society of America. There was also an award named after her, a first for a woman that is still awarded to this day, by the Ecological Society of America – the Braun Award for Excellence in Ecology. She was the first female president of the Ohio Academy of Science and the first woman inducted to the Ohio Conservation Hall of Fame. She was the first female president of the Ecological Society of America. In 1952 she was awarded the Mary Soper Pope medal in Botany because she was one of America’s major ecologists. In 1956 she was awarded the Certificate of Merit by the Botanical Society of America and was declared one of the fifty most outstanding botanists.

References

• Notable American Women, the Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (1980) ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green with Ilene Kantrov and Harriet Walker. Harvard University Press.
• http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/BRAU1889.htm
• http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Emma+Lucy+Braun
• http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Braun,+Emma+Lucy

External links

• Biographical sketch