American botanist and cacti specialist. Born on June 30, 1916, in Los Angeles where he grew up, Reid Moran became interested in cacti as a boy when his geologist father began growing succulents in the backyard and introduced him to Britton and Rose's Cactaceae, the first botanical book he 'cut his teeth on'.

At age 17 he published his first article, "Distribution of Succulents" in Desert magazine, and two years later wrote an article on Cotyledon orbiculata, a species growing on the bluffs near Costa Mesa, then not included in any of the floras. He also corresponded with Dr Donald A. Johansen at Stanford University who named a species of Dudleya growing in Baya California after his young friend calling it Dudleya moranii, and also influenced Moran to study botany at Stanford and specialize in the Crassulaceae. Later he enrolled in the graduate school in Cornell, receiving his masters in botany in 1942, his thesis A Taxonomic Revision of Dudleya Subgenus Stylophyllum.

Enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Moran was called up in December 1942, sent to Europe as a navigator in a B-24 Liberator, and shot down on his first mission, the crew bailing out over Yugoslavia where he was rescued by partisans and in six weeks made his way back to his base in Italy. While waiting in North Africa for a flight home, he lost no time collecting plants and visited Professor René Maire, director of the Botanical Garden and Laboratory at the University of Algiers, who helped him with plant identification and showed him around the succulent and native plant gardens.

After the war, he was hired as a staff botanist at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, where he taught, wrote and assisted the Garden's director, Maunsell van Rensselaer, prepare the second edition of Rensselaer's book on the trees of Santa Barbara. While there he made a collecting expedition to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California where a high proportion of endemic species grow. In 1951, he received his PhD in botany from the University of California in Berkeley for his dissertation A Revision of Dudleya.

Moran then went on to the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell, working on Crassulaceae and Cactaceae for the Hortus Third dictionary, taking time off in 1952 to go collecting with the Sefton-Stanford Expedition to the islands off the Gulf of California. Leaving the Bailey Hortorium the following year, he joined the University of California's Far East Program teaching biology and travelling to Japan, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines where he collected some 350 specimens of Crassulaceae, collaborating with Cornell cytologist Charles H. Uhl who was doing chromosome counts on Crassulaceae. When this program folded Dr Moran was appointed Curator of Botany at the San Diego Museum of Natural History where the herbarium collection under his care expanded to more than 110,000 specimens.

Over the years he continued collecting in California, Mexico, the Baja and Guadalupe Island and on one memorable trip in the Sierra San Borjas, found Cneoridium dumosum some 140 miles south of its previously known range, the now classic account of this discovery appearing in Madroño, volume 16, 1962. During his long career, Dr Moran collected more than 31,000 plants, wrote several hundred scientific papers, and has several plants named in his honour, including the Echevaria moranii E. Walther and Sedum moranii R.T. Clausen.

Sources:
B. Robinson, 1981, Reid Moran, the Biography of a Botanist.