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IN MEMORIAM

David Ross Stoddart

Professor of Geography, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1937-2014

 

David Ross Stoddart, one of the world’s leading authorities on coral reefs and coastal geomorphology and a geographer of international renown, died on November 23rd in Berkeley following a long period of declining health. He was 77.

 

Stoddart was a child of the Great Depression, born in Stockton-on-Tees in northeast England in 1937.Both of his parents served in the First World War. Stoddart developed an early yearning to study the tropics, despite the fact that his family, as he often noted, rarely travelled beyond the confines of the city in which he was raised. In 1956 he went up to Cambridge as an Exhibitioner “from the provinces” and was admitted to the College of St. John the Evangelist. He graduated with a First Class Honors in Geography in 1959. Stoddart was to spend 32 years at Cambridge until he departed for California to take up a position in the Department of Geography at Berkeley in 1988. He was a fellow at Churchill College from 1966 to 1987. Cambridge, he said, opened “every intellectual door” and also exposed him to a strange, odd, if often brilliant, cast of college characters about whom he would tell hilarious stories.

 

Stoddart was something of a nineteenth-century geographer. He led a remarkable life and one that could scarcely be imagined by a young geographer beginning a career in 2014. From his earliest days at Cambridge he participated in, and often led, major research expeditions beginning in 1959 with a party to the headwaters of the Orinoco. His lifelong study of reefs was initiated almost by accident through an opportunity to work on a project headed by John Thorpe on the islands and reefs of British Honduras. So began his illustrious career charting, documenting and accounting for the world’s major reef systems in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

 

Stoddart studied the geomorphology and ecology of tropical islands and reefs, with a particular focus on documenting the plant assemblages present on atolls, making links to evolutionary biology. Several plant species were named for him. He also studied the evolution of atolls since the Pleistocene. Stoddart’s record of fieldwork was nothing short of astonishing. Beginning in Belize, he subsequently conducted research in the Maldives, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, at various locations in the Pacific including the Great Barrier Reef, on the Cook Islands, and in the mid-1970s the Phoenix Islands. While in Belize in 1962, Stoddart received a postcard mailed from a hotel on the Isle of White from his mentor at Cambridge, the great geomorphologist Professor Alfred Steers. It simply read: “My dear David: would you like a job in Cambridge?” He was awarded his PhD in 1964.

 

In much of his work Stoddart seemed barely one step ahead of the British and American military, who were intent on establishing forward bases (with potentially devastating ecological consequences) on isolated atolls. Most famously, in the mid-1960s, while accompanying the military, he discovered the great biodiversity — including the huge tortoise populations — of the Seychelles island of Aldabra. His scientific work (and lobbying) proved to be instrumental in stopping the construction of a British airfield. In 1967, he managed to visit and inventory Diego Garcia, one of the Chagos islands, prior to its appropriation for a controversial American base.

 

Stoddart’s connection to the US long predated his move to Berkeley. He had first visited the campus in the mid 1960s en route from Belize but it was his lifelong collaboration with Raymond Fosberg of the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues at Louisiana State University that cemented his trans-Atlantic ties. A committed internationalist, Stoddart was dedicated to scientific collaboration and support across borders. He was a co-founder in 1980 of the International Society for Reef Studies and its first president. He played a central role in the founding of the International Year of the Reef in 1997, and the establishment of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. A committed conservationist, Stoddart’s research was central to the efforts to protect these hot spots of biodiversity.

 

After three decades of research in the United Kingdom, Stoddart moved across the Atlantic with his family in the late 1980s and served as Chair of the Department of Geography from 1988 to 1994. He steered the Department through some difficult years while hiring key new faculty. Stoddart’s transition to a large public university on the West Coast – coming from the somewhat cloistered and sometimes quite odd confines of a Cambridge college – was not an easy one. He certainly cut a fine figure on campus dressed, even in winter, in ‘full whites’ - white shorts, shirt, socks and plimsolls - with his shock of red hair and full beard. But even the best of American universities seemed to him stuck in the “endless drudgery of marginally useful mandatory courses.” Few universities on this side of the Atlantic grasped, he believed, that advancement of knowledge “depends in large degree on having the opportunity to browse in libraries, to go where the spirit take you, simply to sit down and think.” Stoddart very much lived up to this vision: When a unique property owned by an old San Francisco family on Moorea, French Polynesia, was donated to the University of California as the Gump Biological Station, Stoddart saw to it that each fall a class was offered there for a couple of dozen Berkeley students, and taught on-station for the first several years. Whatever his views on the large lecture, Stoddart could be a brilliant and spellbinding lecturer. Stoddart retired from the university in 2000.

 

Stoddart’s extraordinary research output and impact has been recognized internationally through a raft of prestigious awards. He received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1965 and the Prix Manley-Bendall from the Institut Oceanographique de Monaco and the Société Oceanographique de Paris in 1972. For his Indian Ocean work he was awarded the Livingstone Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1981. For the Pacific work there was the Herbert E. Gregory Medal of the Pacific Science Association in 1986 and the George Davidson Medal of the American Geographical Society in 2001. Perhaps most significantly, he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by the queen in 1979 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000. He especially treasured the first award of the Darwin Medal of the International Society for Reef Studies in 1988, and the Founder's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society awarded in 1979.

While there were places where the match between UC Berkeley’s academic society and David’s exuberant style meshed imperfectly, he and his wife June maintained a cordial home where travelers from around the globe would stay during visits to the Bay Area. David’s circle of acquaintances was vast, and many reflected attributes reminiscent of Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene or even John Le Carre. As strong-willed a supporter of friends as of islands and their environments, David felt and manifested disappointment quite strongly, which could make for joyous victories and severe disappointments. Festooned with great books and folio atlases, his working space in retirement was in a maze-like space in the family house just north of the Berkeley campus. His presence will long be felt.


Stoddart is survived by his wife, June, of Berkeley, California, by his son Michael, daughter Aldabra, and a granddaughter in her teens.

 

Michael Watts

Paul Starrs

Nathan F. Sayre