Jefferies, R.L.

• Robert Lenthall Jefferies

Robert “Bob” Lenthall Jefferies was born on 13 March 1936 in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, and grew up in Clevedon, Somerset. His father, Herbert, was the chief financial officer of the local district council and his mother, Violet, and instilled in him knowledge of British wildflowers and a love of natural history. He studied at the University of Bristol and graduated with a degree in botany with subspecialties in chemistry and microbiology in 1958 and earned his doctorate in plant ecology in 1962. He moved to the University of California, Davis from 1962-64 for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with Emanuel Epstein in the soil and plant nutrition department. In California, he met Susan Locke, who he married in 1964 before returning to England to work with Jack Dainty at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

In 1973, Prof. Jefferies took a year-long sabbatical as visiting professor at the University of Toronto, where Dainty had been made chair of the Department of Botany a year prior. During his visit, Jefferies was asked to stay on as a full professor, which he accepted in 1975. He remained at the University of Toronto until his retirement in 2001. He continued to teach botany and biology as professor emeritus.

Prof. Jefferies’ research focus was the ecological systems of the Hudson-James Bay region. He was first invited to join Fred Cooke at his research camp in La Pérouse Bay near Churchill, Manitoba. From 1978-1992, Jefferies spent his summers there with graduate students and international collaborators, studying nesting snow geese and plant-herbivore interactions as part of the La Pérouse Bay Snow Goose Project. Between 1993-2009, he co-led the Hudson Bay Project with Robert Rockwell of the American Museum of Natural History, and Ken Abraham of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. The project was a collaborative research program which studied surveyed vegetational change and other climactic variables in northern Canada related to population trends of migrating Canada and lesser snow geese.

According to his obituary in the Globe and Mail, “Prof. Jefferies was among the first to recognize that the geese had begun multiplying in unprecedented numbers and that their increased population was turning part of the Arctic into a desert. He also realized that the loss of vegetation allowed seawater to seep in and further degrade the environment which, in turn, caused a decline among other animals living there.” His effort to document climate change's effects is credited with helping inform wildlife management policy, including the establishment of Wapusk National Park in the Hudson Bay lowlands (formerly La Perouse Bay).

He was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the impacts of climate change.

In addition to his research in the field, Prof. Jefferies served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Ecology and was on the editorial board of Global Change Biology. He helped create BIO150: Organisms in the Environment, the largest class in Canada and a required course for most science students at the University of Toronto. He passed away on 8 July 2009.

Created: T. Shida, Aug. 2022
Revised: C.Long, Aug. 2024

• Abbate, Gay. (2009, Jul. 30). U of T prof had a field day with Arctic snow geese. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved on April 6, 2022 from https://research.amnh.org/users/rfr/hbp/globeandmail.htm
• Sage, R., Kotanen, P., Davy, T. & Abraham, K. (2009). Robert L. Jefferies (Obituary). Bulletin of the British Ecological Society (40)4, pp. 49-52.