David George Campbell (born January 28, 1949 in Decatur, Illinois, United States) is an American educator, ecologist, environmentalist, and award-winning author of non-fiction. He is the son of George R. Campbell (1918 - 2004) and Jean Blossom Weilepp (1917 - 1998). Campbell spent his childhood on Eleuthera Island, Bahamas, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He received a BS in biology from Kalamazoo College (1971), an MS in biology from the University of Michigan (1973), and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (1984). He is married to Karen S. Lowell, a phytochemist; they have a daughter. Bahama Islands From 1974-1977, Campbell was the executive Director of the Bahamas National Trust, the organization responsible for parks, reserves, and setting priorities for wildlife conservation in the Bahamian Archipelago. As director he established priorities for the protection of island-endemic species including the rock iguanas (Cyclura spp.) and hutias, and started the process of the Bahamas becoming a signatory to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). His career in the Bahamas culminated in the publication of The Ephemeral Islands, the first natural history of the archipelago to be published since the 1800s. Chincoteague Bay From 1978-1983, Campbell elucidated the etiology of gray crab disease, an amoebic pathogen that every spring kills ca. 30% of the blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) in Chincoteague Bay, VA. His research showed that the disease is spread by cannibalism, mediated by ambient temperature and salinity. Amazonia In 1974, Campbell was a botanical explorer at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil, from where he staged expeditions to study the ethnobotany of the Jamamaji and Paumari Native Americans. Campbell joined the scientific staff of the New York Botanical Garden from 1984–1990, conducting floristic inventories throughout the Brazilian Amazon basin as part of the Projeto Flora Amazônica program; destinations included O Deserto on the Rio Xingu (Pará), the Rio Falsino (Amapá), (Roraima), the Rio Moa and Serra do Divisor National Park (Acre). These expeditions resulted in several notable papers on allelopathy, várzea floodplain forests and anthropogenic lianaceous forests. The Acre expeditions were chronicled in A Land of Ghosts, which won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Antarctica, Africa and Asia In the late 1980s and 1990s, Campbell shifted his research. He examined the impacts of elephants on west African forests, the diversity of subtropical forests in southern China, conducted