The monograph “Leonty Ramensky and his time (life and works)” was published by the Marathon publishing house (St. Petersburg). The book was written by Professor Valentin Golub, graduate of the Department of Morphology, Systematics, and Geography of Plants (today it is the Department of Botany and Mycology) of Voronezh State University, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Ecology of the Volga Basin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation.
The book is dedicated to the life and work of the outstanding geobotanist, ecologist, soil scientist, and geographer Leonty Ramensky who worked at VSU from 1924 to 1928. He organised and headed the VSU Department of Geobotany which was one of the first of its kind in the USSR. Unfortunately, his works were not appreciated during his lifetime. After some time, the scientific community started recognising him as one of the founders of the theory of vegetational cover continuity, its study, and characterisation using multidimensional ordination. Leonty Ramensky is the founder of the study of geographic landscape morphology. He was the first scientist in the world who started identifying biotopes in the landscape and mapping them, and he also developed ecological scales for the indication of environment conditions according to the floristic composition of the vegetational cover.
“Among the reasons why Leonty Ramensky was recognised so late as a great scientist of the 20th century was the isolation from the world science typical for the years of totalitarian regime in the USSR. The heritage of Ramensky’s works shows that any “national science” is a part of the single population, the “world of science”. If one species is isolated from it, the world is impoverished,” said Valentin Golub.
The appearance of the book about Leonty Ramensky is an important event that honours the talented scientists and once again proves that the creation and development of VSU in 1920s-1930 were associated with outstanding researchers.
