Reid Venable Moran

Reid Venable Moran
San Diego Natural History Museum Curator of Botany Reid V. Moran. San Diego Natural History Museum Curator of Botany Reid V. Moran. (Photo: San Diego Natural History Museum Research Library)
Born	June 30, 1916 Los Angeles, California, United States
Died	Clearlake, California, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Botany
Institutions	San Diego Natural History Museum
Author abbrev. (botany)	Moran

Reid Venable Moran (1916–2010) was an American botanist and the curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1957 to 1982.

Moran was the world authority on the Crassulaceae, a family of succulent plants, and in particular the genus Dudleya, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. He named at least 18 plants new to science — some in that family and some not — and published many papers elucidating relationships within the Crassulaceae. As a mark of the respect he earned among his peers, more than a dozen plants have been named for him. Jane Goodall described Moran as "a sort of living myth in botanical exploration in Baja California and the Pacific Islands of Mexico," citing specifically his analysis of the environmental impact of introduced species (especially goats) on the flora of Guadalupe Island.

Biography

Born in Los Angeles, California on June 30, 1916 to Edna Louise Venable and Robert Breck Moran (a petroleum geologist), Moran was raised in Pasadena. He received his B. A. from Stanford University in 1939 and his M. S. from Cornell University in 1942. After service as a navigator in the Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1946, Moran received his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951. His doctoral dissertation was titled "A Revision of Dudleya (Crassulaceae)."

Moran conducted a botanical survey of the Channel Islands for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and performed taxonomic work for the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden and the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University before joining the San Diego Museum of Natural History as curator of botany, succeeding Ethel Bailey Higgins in 1957.

Moran specialized in the systematics of the Crassulaceae (the stonecrop family), and in the floristics of the Baja California peninsula. In addition to a large number of technical research papers, Moran published The Flora of Guadalupe Island and the treatment of the Crassulaceae for the Flora of North America (Vol. 8, published in 2009). He co-authored (with Frank W. Gould) The Grasses of Baja California, Mexico in 1981 and (with Geoffrey A. Levin) The Vascular Flora of Isla Socorro, Mexico in 1989.

Moran died on January 21, 2010, in Clearlake, California.

See the list of genera and species described by Moran.

External links

• Works by Reid Moran at JSTOR
• Works by Reid Moran at the Biodiversity Heritage Library
• The San Diego Natural History Museum Research Library houses a significant collection of Reid Moran’s papers and photographs.
• Moran's 18 volumes of field notes are digitized and indexed at The Flora of Baja California (BajaFlora.org).
• The University and Jepson Herbaria houses a collection of lists of label data for Reid Moran’s botanical collections made in the Philippines, Korea, Okinawa, Japan, and Guam between 1954 and 1956.
• Photographs (prints, negatives, and slides) taken by Moran of the flora and physical features of the Baja peninsula and Guadalupe Island are held in the Robert B. and William R. Moran MSS Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara.