David Goodall (botanist)

David W. Goodall
Born	(1914-04-04) 4 April 1914 Edmonton, London, England
Nationality	Australia
Alma mater	University of London
Known for	Editor-in-Chief of the multivolume Ecosystems of the World seminal papers on ecological gradient analysis
Scientific career
Fields	Ecology
Institutions	Edith Cowan University

David William Goodall (born 4 April 1914) is an Australian botanist and ecologist. He was influential in the early development of numerical methods in ecology, particularly the study of vegetation.

Goodall completed his BSc in 1935 and his PhD in 1941, both at the University of London. In 1948, he moved to Australia to become senior lecturer of botany at the University of Melbourne. 1952-1954, he served as reader in botany at the then University College of the Gold Coast (now University of Ghana. He received the DSc degree from the University of Melbourne in 1953. He then returned to England to take the position as professor of agricultural botany at the University of Reading 1954–1956. From 1956 to 1967, he was a research scientist at various CSIRO divisions in Australia, then professor of biology at the University of California, USA, 1967–1968, and professor of systems ecology at Utah State University, USA 1968-1974. For the rest of his career, he was affiliated with CSIRO again, and retired in 1979.

He was promoted to doctor honoris causa at the Università degli Studí di Trieste, Italy, in 1990.

He turned 100 in April 2014.

Goodall is still active, currently an honorary research associate at the Centre for Ecosystem Management at Edith Cowan University and Editor-in-Chief of the series Ecosystems of the World. He is thought to be the oldest scientist still working in Australia, as of January 2016, followed by Dr Max Day, who was born on December 21, 1915.

Selected scientific works

• A probabilistic similarity index. Nature, 203:1098.
• Some considerations in the use of point quadrats for the analysis of vegetation. Australian Journal of Scientific Research. Ser. B: Biological Sciences, 5 (1): 1-41. 1952. PubMed ID: 14934631.
• Classification, probability, and utility. Nature, 211: 53-54. 1966.
• Hypothesis-testing in classification. Nature, 211 (5046): 329-30. 1966. PubMed ID: 5965563
• Numerical taxonomy of bacteria - some published data re-examined. Journal of General Microbiology, 42 (1): 25-37. 1966. PubMed ID: 5922296.
• The distribution of the matching coefficient. Biometrics, 23 (4): 647-656. 1967. PubMed ID: 6080202
• Ecosystems of the World, 36 volumes published in the series 1974 to present by Elsevier, Amsterdam) with Goodall as Editor-in-Chief. He also co-authored two of the volumes, Mediterranean-type Shrublands (1981) and Hot Deserts and Arid Shrublands (1986).