Government of Catalonia

The President of the Generalitat of Catalonia presented the award on 26th October at the Palau de la Generalitat

The Board of Administration of the 2007 Ramon Margalef Prize for Ecology and Environmental Sciences decided to award the prize to the North American researcher Harold A. Mooney. Mooney is considered to be one of the pioneers in plant physiological ecology and has centred his research on the study and the evaluation of phenomena which affect global changes, such as ecological invasions, the loss of diversity and the degradation of ecosystems.

Thanks to his work, he has become an international leader in assessment tasks at political level, working on environmental problems related to climate change.

Mooney's expertise ranges from measuring the adaptations of individual plants to measuring the processes of ecosystems and showing how human-induced ecological disturbances modify the functioning of the Earth as a whole.

Mooney has demonstrated that several species of plants develop the same physiological characteristics in response to the same local environment.

Thanks to his research, universities around the world are creating global departments dedicated to ecological research. Mooney has published several books on science as well as articles in order to promote an interest among society in science.