His 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, would inform the management of national parks and programs protecting wildlife around the world. It launched a whole new field of inquiry dedicated to documenting the negative impact of species on the move, a field known as “invasion biology,” which would take off in the 1980s. The book would be hailed for decades to come as “one of the central scientific books of our century,”29 as the science writer David Quammen called it in 2000.
