Durward Allen papers

Durward Leon Allen was a professor of Forestry and Conservation at Purdue University. He was born on October 10, 1910 in Uniondale, Indiana, and died of a heart attack on October 17, 1997, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Allen graduated from the University of Michigan in 1932 and completed his Ph.D. in 1937 at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University), where his doctoral research focused on the vertebrate fauna of lower Michigan farmland. He established his reputation in wildlife research while with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources from 1935-1946, studying the ecology of small game animals. Following military service with the Army in Europe from 1943-1945, Allen moved east to direct studies of wildlife on agricultural lands for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually serving as acting director of research in 1953-1954. In 1954 Allen accepted an academic post in the Department of Forestry and Conservation (now Forestry and Natural Resources) at Purdue University, and in the same year he published a revolutionary critique of wildlife management, Our Wildlife Legacy (Funk and Wagnalls Co.). This book emphasized the need to maintain wildlife diversity for a multitude of values and was popular as a college text for 25 years. He went on to accomplish many more things in his career, and is noted as helping to establish wildlife conservation as a science.

Source: Rolf O. Peterson, L. David Mech, Harmon P. Weeks, Jr., and Charles M. Kirkpatrick. Wildlife Society Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1999): 239-240.