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Draft talk:David Geoffrey Green

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Evidence of significance in support of case for creating this page.

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EVIDENCE OF SIGNIFICANCE

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The case for significance rests on several achievements and contributions by David Green during his long career. Most of the evidence is provided by references cited in the article; additional references are provided below. In summary, Green's main achievements fall into four areas …

Pioneering contributions to the Web

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Green was a pioneer of the World Wide Web in Australia. His LIFE server at ANU was Australia's first Web site. For evidence, see Roger Clarke's history of the Web in Australia: 1992-95 (Clarke 2014). The following extract makes Green's significance clear:

"5.2 Pioneers - 1992-93. The evidence is clear that the first web-server in Australia was David Green's Bioinformatics site, at life.anu.edu.au. The server-software was installed by Gaby Hoffmann (personal communication, December 2011), and the site-content was established by David Green in mid-1992. It was therefore among the first 20 sites in the world."

Clarke’s article also mentions Green’s work to support other early adopters, and international development. e.g.

  • In December 1993, the register of Australian web-servers operated by David Green for NCSA, …
  • August 8, 1993 ... The ANU Bioinformatics Hypermedia Service [David Green] ... continues to evolve. See information on the International Organization for Plant Information ..., …
  • September 5, 1993 ... A new Guide to Australia ... is now online, courtesy Jim Croft and David Green (in Australia).

Seminal contributions to complexity theory

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One of Green’s important contributions was his proof that networks are inherent in the structure and behaviour of all complex systems. Originally announced at a conference in 1992, the proof has been presented in many later publications, for example (Green 1994;2000; Green et al 2014).

This proof had far-reaching consequences:

  • It showed that underlying almost all critical physical phenomena (e.g. crystallization, epidemic spread) is the connectivity avalanche (Erdos & Renyi 1960) that occurs as the edge density increases in a network.
  • Research into complex networks increased rapidly after 1993, as other researchers uncovered more properties of networks in nature and society. Prior to 1993, the number of articles that mention both “complex system” and “network” was ~20,000. After 1993, this number increased by an order or magnitude to >200,000. Likewise, the number that include both terms in their title rose from 7 prior to 1993, to more than 300 since then.
  • It led to the theory of Dual-phase evolution, which shows how order emerges in many complex systems.
  • He also showed how complex networks impact landscape ecology (e.g. Green 1989) and social networks (Green 2014; 2023).

Significance of contributions to environment and conservation

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Conservation

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During the 1990s, organizations around the world were beginning to deploy computers, and the emerging Web, to support global conservation by sharing biodiversity information. Green played a leading, early role in three of these programmes.

  • He was Associate Director (1991-2) of the Australian Government's pioneering ERIN project, the Environmental Resources Information Network (Green & Bolton 1991).
  • The International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI). Roger Clarke’s article (cited in the entry) confirms his role in both ERIN and IOPI. Green’s role in IOPI is confirmed by links by documents still held on the historical German site (IOPI Home page). This document also shows that Green was a member of IOPI's Information Systems Committee and that its original server was Green's web site at Charles Sturt University.
  • The Biodiversity Information Network for the 21st Century (BIN21) was a project founded in Brazil. The archived web site maintained by the Australian National Botanic Gardens shows that Green was a founding member of the Technical Group and that his server was one of the original nodes.

Plant Ecology

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Green made seminal contributions to knowledge about plant ecology. He introduced technical innovations that led to important discoveries.

  • He founded the field of fine resolution pollen analysis, which extracts data from sediment cores at fine resolution. This allows botanists and biogeographers to discover processes that shaped fire in the past. His seminal contributions appeared in two articles (Green 1983; Green 1987; Green & Dolman 1988; Green et al 1988). In these and related articles, he showed the role that fire plays in ecological transitions. A recent search of Google scholar listed 573 articles that mention fine resolution pollen and nearly 600 mention "pollen time series", both terms introduced by Green.
  • His highly cited article (Green 1989) was the first to simulate the distributions patterns of vegetation in a landscape (273 citations). It showed how processes combine to produce observed spatial patterns and distributions. He followed with a series of articles that developed these ideas.
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The following popular science books by Green are listed with links, at the end of the article

He is also author of three encyclopaedia articles ….

  • Self-Organization in Ecology, for Elsevier’s Encyclopedia of Ecology, (first published in 2005, latest edition to appear 2024)
               https://shop.elsevier.com/books/encyclopedia-of-ecology/fath/978-0-443-21964-1

His article was titled "Hierarchy, Complexity and Agent-based models" (see e-copy available on Google Scholar): https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I_ZDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1273&dq=+%22HIERARCHY,+COMPLEXITY,+AND+AGENT-BASED+MODELS%22&ots=fqWwkUojdI&sig=c1ALKgOYGAQqUBhtug5j0WwLj_4#v=onepage&q=%22HIERARCHY%2C%20COMPLEXITY%2C%20AND%20AGENT-BASED%20MODELS%22&f=false

At the end of the EOLSS article is a biography that confirms several of the points about significance made here.

  • McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (pp.507-511) Publisher: McGraw-Hill 2006 Green's article was titled "Complexity theory".


Publications

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  • BIN21 (archived). Biodiversity Information Network. https://www.anbg.gov.au/bin21/introduction.html#organization
  • Clarke, R. (2013). Morning dew on the Web in Australia: 1992–1995. Journal of Information Technology 28(2), 93-110. A copy is available online at … https://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzWH.html
  • Green, David G., and Gary S. Dolman. "Fine resolution pollen analysis." Journal of Biogeography (1988): 685-701.
  • Green, David, Gurdip Singh, Henry Polach, Daphne Moss, John Banks, and Elizabeth A. Geissler. "A fine-resolution palaeoecology and palaeoclimatology from south-eastern Australia." The Journal of Ecology (1988): 790-806.
  • Green, D. G. (1989). Simulated effects of fire, dispersal and spatial pattern on competition within forest mosaics. Vegetatio, 82, 139-153.
  • Green, D. G. (1994). Connectivity and the evolution of biological systems. Journal of Biological Systems 2(01), 91-103. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218339094000088
  • Green, D.G. (2000). Self-organisation in complex systems. In: Complex Systems, pp. 7-41.Cambridge University Press.
  • Green, D.G., Liu, J., Abbass, H.A. (2014). Dual-Phase Evolution. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8423-4_1
  • IOPI Home page (archived) https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/ibc99/iopi/iopihome.html

Geoffrey I Webb (talk) 03:28, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Just a note to say that I've not read the post above in its entirety but I thought it might be useful if, for your convenience, I was to point you towards the notability criteria for academics, which you can locate here: WP:PROF. Regards, Axad12 (talk) 14:58, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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