David Stoddart (geographer)

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David R. Stoddart
Born(1937-11-15)15 November 1937
Stockton-on-Tees, England
Died23 November 2014(2014-11-23) (aged 77)
Berkeley, California, US
NationalityBritish
Alma mater University of Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD.)
Scientific career
Fields biogeography, coral reefs, atolls
Institutions University of Cambridge
University of California, Berkeley

David Ross Stoddart, OBE (15 November 1937 – 23 November 2014) was a British physical geographer known for the study of coral reefs and atolls. He was also known for key works on the history and philosophy of geography as an academic discipline. He was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then professor and later emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] [2]

Contents

Early and private life

Stoddart grew up in Stockton-on-Tees, northeast England. His parents both served in France during the First World War, his father with the Royal Flying Corps and his mother as a nurse. His father later became an engineer working in the construction of heavy industrial buildings for Ashmore, Benson, and Pease (later Davy International; now part of Siemens). He had two siblings.

He married fellow Cambridge geographer June in 1961 and had a daughter, Aldabra (named after the island) and a son, Michael. He collected a very large private library in Berkeley.

Stoddart suffered from diabetes and skin cancer in later life. [3] He died in Berkeley, California, on 23 November 2014. [4]

Academic career

Stoddart was possibly the first person from his local grammar school (now demolished) to enter the University of Cambridge, in 1956 (a schoolfriend secured a place at Oxford). He studied tropical geography at St.John's College with Alfred Steers from 1956, graduating with a first class degree in 1959. His introduction to coral reefs came on the Cambridge Expedition to British Honduras (Belize), 1959–60. He returned there for further research into corals and the plants of the cays, working for Louisiana State University before and after a major hurricane, tracking its effects on atolls and reefs. He gained a Cambridge PhD for this work in 1964 and was appointed lecturer in geography at Cambridge, rising through the ranks. He was a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1987. [5] In the mid-1980s he was a Regents Fellow at the Smithsonian.

He was appointed chair of department and professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, holding the headship until 1994, when he was forced aside by the dean. The department had internal conflicts, and Stoddart had managed these effectively for the first few years, hiring several new staff. Ill health was cited when he retired from Berkeley in 2000.

Stoddart studied the geomorphology and ecology of tropical islands and reefs, beginning in Belize, then the Maldives, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, and various locations in the Pacific including the Great Barrier Reef, Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, and in the mid-1970s to the disputed Phoenix Islands. His particular focus was documenting the plant assemblages present on atolls, making links to evolutionary biology. He also studied the evolution of atolls since the Pleistocene. [6]

In the mid-1960s, accompanying a military expedition, he discovered great biodiversity and documented the huge tortoise populations on the Seychelles island of Aldabra, and the scientific work on its habitat was instrumental in stopping the construction of a British military airfield. The island became a World Heritage Site in 1982. In 1967, a similar expedition went to Diego Garcia, one of the Chagos Islands, prior to its appropriation for a controversial American base. [7]

The decline in interest and status of the discipline of climatic geomorphology was in part indebted to a 1969 publication of Stoddart. [8] [9] Stoddart criticized climatic geomorphology for applying supposedly "trivial" methodologies in establishing landform differences between morphoclimatic zones, being linked to Davisian geomorphology and by allegedly neglecting the fact that physical laws governing processes are the same across the globe. [9]

He also held an interest in the history of geographic thought, publishing a major book On Geography and Its History in 1986 and several articles about the discipline, and on the contribution of Darwin's work to understanding the Earth. A parallel program on the morphology and hydrodynamics of salt marshes was largely conducted in the UK. [6] He also studied mangroves and sedimentation.

He published work in the Smithsonian Institution's Atoll Research Bulletin. He was also one of the founders of the journal Progress in Geography, and the first co-ordinating editor of the journal Coral Reefs. He was a co-founder and first president of the International Society for Reef Studies and helped to establish the quadrennial International Coral Reef Symposium. He was also involved in the establishment of the International Year of the Reef in 1997, and of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

Recognition

Key Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atoll</span> Ring-shaped coral reef

An atoll is a ring-shaped island, including a coral rim that encircles a lagoon. There may be coral islands or cays on the rim. Atolls are located in warm tropical or subtropical parts of the oceans and seas where corals can develop. Most of the approximately 440 atolls in the world are in the Pacific Ocean.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geography of Seychelles</span>

Seychelles is a small island country east of the African continent's mainland located in the Sea of Zanj due north of Madagascar, with Antsiranana as its nearest foreign city. Seychelles lies between approximately 4ºS and 10ºS and 46ºE and 54ºE. The nation is an archipelago of 115 tropical islands, some granite and some coral. the majority of which are small and uninhabited. The landmass is only 452 km2 (175 sq mi), but the islands are spread wide over an exclusive economic zone of 1,336,559 km2 (516,048 sq mi). About 90 percent of the population of 90,000 live on Mahé, 9 percent on Praslin and La Digue. Around a third of the land area is the island of Mahé and a further third the atoll of Aldabra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geomorphology</span> Scientific study of landforms

Geomorphology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of topographic and bathymetric features created by physical, chemical or biological processes operating at or near Earth's surface. Geomorphologists seek to understand why landscapes look the way they do, to understand landform and terrain history and dynamics and to predict changes through a combination of field observations, physical experiments and numerical modeling. Geomorphologists work within disciplines such as physical geography, geology, geodesy, engineering geology, archaeology, climatology, and geotechnical engineering. This broad base of interests contributes to many research styles and interests within the field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coral reef</span> Outcrop of rock in the sea formed by the growth and deposit of stony coral skeletons

A coral reef is an underwater ecosystem characterized by reef-building corals. Reefs are formed of colonies of coral polyps held together by calcium carbonate. Most coral reefs are built from stony corals, whose polyps cluster in groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aldabra</span> Coral atoll in the Indian Ocean

Aldabra is the world's second-largest coral atoll, lying southeast of the continent of Africa. It is part of the Aldabra Group of islands in the Indian Ocean that are part of the Outer Islands of the Seychelles, with a distance of 1,120 km (700 mi) southwest of the capital, Victoria on Mahé Island.

Cosmoledo Atoll is an atoll of the Aldabra Group and belongs to the Outer Islands of the Seychelles, and is located 1,029 km (639 mi) southwest of the capital, Victoria, on Mahé Island.

John Stanley Gardiner (1872–1946) was a British zoologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microatoll</span>

A microatoll is a circular colony of coral, dead on the top but living around the perimeter. Growth is mainly lateral, as upward growth is limited by exposure to air. Microatolls may be up to 6 meters (20 ft) in diameter. They are named for their resemblance to island atolls formed during the subsidence of volcanic islands, as originally suggested by Darwin (1842).

Andrew Shaw Goudie is a geographer at the University of Oxford specialising in desert geomorphology, dust storms, weathering, and climatic change in the tropics. He is also known for his teaching and best-selling textbooks on human impacts on the environment. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of forty-one books and more than two hundred papers published in learned journals. He combines research and some teaching with administrative roles.

Colin D. Woodroffe is an Australasian geographer and coastal geomorphologist currently serving as professorial fellow at the University of Wollongong. He is the coordinator of the GeoQuEST Research Centre. His international research focuses on the morphology, stratigraphy and sedimentary dynamics of tropical and subtropical coasts, and the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to the study of processes and change in the coastal zone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wildlife of Seychelles</span>

The wildlife of Seychelles comprises the flora and fauna of the Seychelles islands off the eastern coast of Africa in the western Indian Ocean.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Haggett</span> British geographer and academic (born 1933)

Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

<i>The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs</i> Book published in 1842 by Charles Darwin

The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Being the first part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle, under the command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. during the years 1832 to 1836, was published in 1842 as Charles Darwin's first monograph, and set out his theory of the formation of coral reefs and atolls. He conceived of the idea during the voyage of the Beagle while still in South America, before he had seen a coral island, and wrote it out as HMS Beagle crossed the Pacific Ocean, completing his draft by November 1835. At the time there was great scientific interest in the way that coral reefs formed, and Captain Robert FitzRoy's orders from the Admiralty included the investigation of an atoll as an important scientific aim of the voyage. FitzRoy chose to survey the Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. The results supported Darwin's theory that the various types of coral reefs and atolls could be explained by uplift and subsidence of vast areas of the Earth's crust under the oceans.

A pseudo-atoll, like an atoll, is an island that encircles a lagoon, either partially or completely. A pseudo-atoll differs from an atoll as established by several authorities, such as how it is formed. It is considered a preferable term to "near-atoll". There is a need for rigorous definition of "pseudo-atoll" before it can be accepted as a general term.

A raised coral atoll or uplifted coral atoll is an atoll that has been lifted high enough above sea level by tectonic forces which then protect it from scouring by storms and enable soils and diverse – often endemic – species of flora and fauna to develop. With the exception of Aldabra Island in the Indian Ocean and Henderson Island in the Pacific Ocean, most tropical raised atolls have been dramatically altered by human activities such as species introduction, phosphate mining, and even bomb testing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climatic geomorphology</span>

Climatic geomorphology is the study of the role of climate in shaping landforms and the earth-surface processes. An approach used in climatic geomorphology is to study relict landforms to infer ancient climates. Being often concerned about past climates climatic geomorphology considered sometimes to be an aspect of historical geology. Since landscape features in one region might have evolved under climates different from those of the present, studying climatically disparate regions might help understand present-day landscapes. For example, Julius Büdel studied both cold-climate processes in Svalbard and weathering processes in tropical India to understand the origin of the relief of Central Europe, which he argued was a palimpsest of landforms formed at different times and under different climates.

1928 Great Barrier Reef expedition, also known as the Yonge Expedition or the Low Isles Expedition was a thirteen-month scientific program beginning in 1928, which was promoted to study the Australian Great Barrier Reef.

Heather Viles is a professor of biogeomorphology and heritage conservation in the school of geography and the environment at Oxford University, senior fellow at Worcester College, and honorary professor at the Institute of Sustainable Heritage, University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Society for Geomorphology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coral reefs of Tuvalu</span> List of coral reefs in Tuvalu

The coral reefs of Tuvalu consist of three reef islands and six atolls, containing approximately 710 km2 (270 sq mi) of reef platforms. The islands of the Tuvalu archipelago are spread out between the latitude of 5° to 10° south and longitude of 176° to 180°, west of the International Date Line. The islands of Tuvalu are volcanic in origin. On the atolls, an annular reef rim surrounds the lagoon, and may include natural reef channels. The reef islands have a different structure to the atolls, and are described as reef platforms as they are smaller tabular reef platforms that do not have a salt-water lagoon, although they may have a completely closed rim of dry land, with the remnants of a lagoon that has no direct connection to the open sea or that may be drying up.

References

  1. ↑ "David Stoddart - Geography at Berkeley". Archived from the original on 10 September 2014. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  2. ↑ Obituary, The Independent, 4 December 2014
  3. ↑ "Walker Talks". Archived from the original on 9 June 2013. Retrieved 17 November 2013. Walker, R. 2012. From the Age of Dino-Sauers to the Anthropo-Scene: Reminiscences of life in Berkeley Geography, 1975–2012. Retirement talk, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 25 April 2012
  4. ↑ "David Stoddart obituary". TheGuardian.com . 9 December 2014.
  5. ↑ http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/atollresearchbulletin/issues/00494.12.pdf Stoddart, D.R. 2001. Be of good cheer, my weary readers, for I have espied land. Atoll Research Bulletin 494(12)
  6. 1 2 Spencer, T. 2011. David Stoddart. In Hopley, D. (ed.). 'Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs: Structure, Form and Process'. Springer. p1044.
  7. ↑ http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/atollresearchbulletin/issues/00494.12.pdf Stoddart, D.R. 2001. Be of good cheer, my weary readers, for I have espied land. Attoll Research Bulletin 494(12)
  8. ↑ Goudie, A.S. (2004). "Climatic geomorphology". In Goudie, A.S. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Geomorphology. pp. 162–164.
  9. 1 2 Thomas, Michael F. (2004). "Tropical geomorphology". In Goudie, A.S. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Geomorphology. pp. 1063–1069.
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