David H. Reed, an Associate Editor of Conservation Genetics, passed away suddenly on 24 October 2011, at age 48 from heart failure. David is survived by his wife Rasita and daughter Vanessa (6 years of age), his mother and three brothers.

David was an outstanding scientist who achieved a great deal in a scientific career post-PhD of only 13 years. He had 47 published papers (with more to come), and has been cited 1755 times (ISI Web of Knowledge 19 Dec 2011). David was a highly valued Associate Editor for Conservation Genetics (2005–2011), an Associate Editor (2007–2010) and then Editor (from 2010) of Animal Conservation, and an Associate Editor of Journal of Wildlife Thailand (from 2011).

David was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey to parents of modest means, a situation worsened by his father’s death at 46, also from heart failure. He completed a BBA in economics and statistics at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee in 1988. David joined the military and completed several years of service, which assisted him in obtaining his college and graduate education. Below we highlight his most novel and important scientific contributions.

PhD (completed 1998)

David completed his PhD in conservation and evolutionary genetics at the University of Houston with Ed Bryant. His investigations of problems in conservation genetics using house flies resulted in six papers. A highlight was Reed and Bryant (2000), where the time to extinction due to genetic problems approximated the effective population size in generations.

Postdoctoral fellowship at Macquarie University (1999–2001)

David subsequently moved to Sydney, Australia to work with Dick Frankham and David Briscoe. There he gained expertise in Drosophila research, meta-analyses, and population viability analyses (PVA). In total, he published 10 papers with the Macquarie group. David’s best cited Drosophila paper (Reed et al. 2003a) demonstrated substantial impacts of inbreeding on extinction rates at effective population sizes (N e) common for threatened species.

His two most cited papers were meta-analyses from this period. Reed and Frankham (2003) showed a significant positive correlation between genetic diversity and population fitness, a relationship that was predicted from theory, but where empirical evidence was unclear. Reed and Frankham (2001) reported a non-significant negative correlation between population mean molecular and quantitative genetic variation for fitness. This work cast doubt on the value of molecular assessments of ‘neutral’ genetic diversity as guides to adaptive genetic variation.

His paper on estimating minimum viable population sizes in vertebrates (MVP; Reed et al. 2003c) showed that ~6,000 adults are required for long-term viability in the face of all threats, while Reed et al. (2003b) revealed that the risk of a severe catastrophe was ~14% per generation across vertebrates. These papers and O’Grady et al. (2008) established that extinction risk scales to generations, not years. Consequently, data for all vertebrate species can be compared on an equivalent footing, whilst prior authors had stressed differences among taxa.

University of Mississippi (2002–2009)

After a brief period at Missouri State University (2001–2002), David was appointed as Assistant Professor (2002–2008) at the University of Mississippi, and subsequently promoted to Associate Professor (2008–2009). During this time he began empirical studies of population structure and viability on wolf spiders, the Yazoo darter, and clouded leopards. He served as the advisor to four graduate students.

A highlight of this period was the paper ‘Extinction risk in fragmented populations’ (Reed 2004), a leading paper in its field. He demonstrating using PVA that metapopulation dynamics interact with gene flow, environmental conditions, inbreeding depression and population growth rates to mediate extinction risk. David again addressed the MVP issue in Reed (2005), this time in plants where he showed that populations of at least 2,000 were required for long-term persistence.

The Armbruster and Reed (2005) meta-analysis on ‘Inbreeding depression in benign and stressful environments’ reported an average 69% greater inbreeding depression in stressful than in benign environments, and was the subject of a praiseworthy News and Commentary in Heredity. David was involved in several other publications on this topic, including Liao and Reed (2009) and Fox and Reed (2011), as well as several studies on natural populations of wolf spiders as models for population dynamics (e.g. Reed et al. 2007).

University of Louisville (2009–2011)

David was Associate Professor of Biology and the Wallace Chair of Conservation at the time of his death. He was pursuing projects using molecular tools on invasive reptiles in Florida (USA), Asiatic black bears and elephants in Thailand, and tigers in Bangladesh. David was highly productive and published 12 articles during his period at Louisville as well as mentoring three graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows, plus several graduate students that were still at the University of Mississippi.

Research collaborations

In addition to his collaborations with Australian colleagues, David collaborated with a large number of researchers in the USA, Denmark and Thailand. He had a major continuing collaboration with Charles Fox (University of Kentucky) and more recently with Torsten Kristensen, Volker Loeschcke and Cino Pertoldi (Aarhus University).

David was awarded two Fulbright travel grants to Thailand, the first in 2004 at Prince Songkla University (Hat Yai), and the second in 2007–2008 at Kasetsart University (Bangkok). Since 2008 he collaborated with researchers and students at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) (Bangkok). In Thailand, David taught multiple courses, did research, advised and mentored staff and students. He was on the thesis committees of three graduate students from KMUTT at the time of his passing.

Conservation contributions through CBSG

David was an active member of the IUCN/SSC Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG), beginning with his contributions to the Alabama beach mouse at the 2004 Population and Habitat Viability Assessment (PHVA) workshop. From 2004 to 2009 David worked with Kathy Traylor-Holzer and others to apply his population modelling expertise to several CBSG PHVA and conservation planning efforts for threatened species, including proboscis monkeys in Indonesia, Asiatic golden cats and clouded leopards in Thailand, Tsushima leopard cats and Okinawa rails in Japan, pangolins in Taiwan, and hellbenders in the USA. Several of the above papers are used by CBSG modellers and others to guide the construction of PVA models.

David Reed will be sadly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues, and will leave a major gap in our discipline. His legacy is the significant body of published work, the new conservation biologists that he trained, and the cumulative intellectual and conservation benefits that he leaves behind.