Estella Leopold

Estella Bergere Leopold (January 8, 1927 – February 25, 2024) was an American paleobotanist, environmentalist, and professor of botany and forest sciences. Elected in 1974 a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she was awarded in 1993 the Wilbur Cross Medal, in 2010 the International Cosmos Prize, and in 2013 the Paleontological Society Medal.

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Quotes

The evidence from lithology and fossils indicates that Eniwetok, Bikini, and probably the other Marshall Islands, are cylinders of coral slowly building on a sinking volcanic neck or guyot; subsidence has occurred in Eocene and younger time, and there were three major periods of emergence during which the coral rocks were weathered subaerially.
- Miocene pollen and spore flora of Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands. Geological Survey Professional Papers 260–11. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1969. pp. 1133–1185; with Plates 304–311. (quote on p. 1133)

My father had developed a craving to have his own land to experiment with a new idea: ecological restoration. We needed, he said, to find out what the original vegetation had been like in our area and what we could do to bring it back. That, and his desire to have a special place to hunt, led to his purchase in the mid-1930s of an abandoned farm along the Wisconsin River, in the Sand Counties—"the Shack." He specifically chose the Shack land because of its isolation and because this farm was a land of impoverished soil that had become an agricultural failure. In his view this was sick land that needed restoration; it needed to see again the native species that once must have grown here. It was one instance of his larger vision of the countrywide importance of land health and fostering the community of life.
- &pg=PR11 Stories from the Leopold Shack: Sand County Revisited. Oxford University Press. 2016. pp. xi–xiv. ISBN 9780190463236. (256 pages; quote from pp. xi–xii)

To better understand how far various pollen grains were transported by wind, she and Allen Solomon (then at the University of Arizona) set a network of pollen traps near Searles and Mono Lakes in the Mojave Desert to match the pollen rain with different plant communities. These data were used to develop a pollen-vegetation calibration that still informs paleoecological studies in the region and beyond.
- Cathy Whitlock, Peter Dunwiddie, Caroline A. E. Strömberg, and Susan Flader, (December 2024) "Estella Bergere Leopold January 8, 1927–February 25, 2024". Biographical Memoirs, U.S. National Academy of Sciences: 1–5. (quote from p. 2)