A blue plaque has been unveiled to jointly honour the 'father of animal ecology' Charles Elton FRS and his wife E.J. Scovell, a distinguished poet. 

The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board revealed the honour for the descendants and friends of the couple at 61 Park Town, Oxford, on June 8. 

Charles Sutherland Elton (1900 – 1991), was a zoologist who sought to enhance the scientific basis for the study of animal behaviour. 

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The Board said, in the process, he changed "natural history into ecology:  the quantitative and experimental study of living organisms in relation to their environments". 

He spent his whole career at Oxford University. 

Edith Joy Scovell (1907-1999) was a distinguished poet and wrote verse from her time as an undergraduate at Somerville up to her later years. 

The impressive couple married in 1937 and from 1949 they lived at 61 Park Town where Charles tended the community gardens, and where the plaque now honours their contributions. 

In honouring Charles, the board said: "His work popularized notions like ‘food chain’ and later ‘ecosystem’.

They said: "He began his research during pioneering expeditions to Spitzbergen in the 1920s, where he investigated the life-cycles of small mammal populations under Arctic conditions."

His seminal survey of Animal Ecology (1927) created a new field and in 1932 he became the first editor of a Journal of Animal Ecology , and established at Oxford a Bureau of Animal Population.

From 1949, Elton then helped to found and sustain Nature Conservancy, the first official body to promote the cause of British wildlife.

He believed: "Conservation should mean the keeping or putting in the landscape of the greatest possible ecological variety." 

By the 1940s, Elton's local base was Wytham Woods where he set up the first long-term research projects, and his field diaries from that period, recently made available online, are a key source for the history of ecology as well as models of meticulous observation. 

Elton was elected FRS in 1953; he received the Society’s Darwin medal in 1970 and four animals now bear his name: a small chironomid; a male spider; a small, white enchytraeid worm; and a tropical forest trombiculid mite.

Scovell's first collection Shadows of Chrysanthemums was published in 1944 followed by three other collections at considerable intervals.

She accompanied her husband to Central and South America and the West Indies as a recorder and field researcher, and many of her poems details of the natural world.

She received the distinguished Cholmondeley award for poetry in late recognition of her achievement.