Margaret Bryan Davis

Margaret Bryan Davis (born October 23, 1931, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 22, 2024, Colorado) was an American paleoecologist best known for her pioneering work in the science of palynology (the study of plant pollen and spores). Her most-influential work involved the use of pollen recovered from lake sediment and soil to reconstruct ancient plant communities. Her research was instrumental in demonstrating that the structure of biological communities changed in response to environmental factors, such as climatic variation, over time.

Davis spent her childhood and adolescent years in the Boston area. She studied plant physiology and ecology at Radcliffe College, and before she graduated in 1953, she examined pollen deposits of the Quaternary Period (2.58 million years ago to the present) under the direction of American paleobotanist Elso Barghoorn. From 1953 to 1954 Davis studied palynology with Danish palynologist Johannes Iversen at the University of Copenhagen as a Fulbright scholar. As part of her project she collected pollen samples in Greenland that were deposited during an interglacial period (a relatively warm period between ice ages). After marrying American scientist Rowland Davis in 1956, she completed a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University in 1957.

Davis then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and at the California Institute of Technology, and she later served as a research fellow at Yale University. In 1961 she joined the department of botany at the University of Michigan as a research associate. In 1963 she published a paper that revolutionized how pollen records were interpreted. Her subsequent research considered how various tree species and forest communities migrated back and forth across eastern North America during the previous 14,000 years. This body of work helped to develop the modern theoretical basis for predicting changes in forest composition in response to global warming.

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In 1973 Davis returned to Yale to serve as a professor of biology, a position she held until 1976. That year she accepted an offer to serve as the head of the department of ecology and behavioral biology at the University of Minnesota. She left that post in 1981 but remained at the university, retiring as professor emeritus in 2000.

In addition to her numerous honors, Davis received the Eminent Ecologist Award in 1993 from the Ecological Society of America, an organization in which she served as president from 1987 to 1988. She also served as president of the American Quaternary Association from 1978 to 1980, and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1982.