It's not often an ecologist gets to play sleuth in so adventurous a fashion—picking through musty papers in the Midwest for 100-year-old hand-drawn maps that lead through dense Alaskan underbrush populated by wolves and brown bears. But that's how scientist Brian Buma tracked down the work of a legend—a godfather of modern ecology so prominent in his field that the Ecological Society of America has an award named after him.

Buma, a University of Alaska, Southeast, assistant professor, was hunting for nine tiny patches of land in the enormous wilderness of Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park. These square-meter-sized plots first mapped in 1916 by botanist William Skinner Cooper were central to one of the longest-running natural