United States botanist. David Daniel Keck was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a choir director and music teacher, but the family later moved to Riverside, California. His interest in natural history was encouraged by his high school biology teacher, Edmund Carroll Jaeger, who years later dedicated his Denizens of the Desert (1922) to Keck in memory of their many trips to the Colorado Desert to study the desert wildlife; and by Loye Holmes Miller, another resident naturalist, who taught at the University of California.

Keck went on to study botany at Pomona College, earning his BSc and MSc degrees under the guidance of Professor Philip Munz, at whose suggestion he revised the genus Orthocarpus for his master's thesis. His doctoral research with Harvey Monroe Hall at the University of California at Berkeley was a study of part the difficult genus Penstemon from the same family. After graduating, he continued realignments of the genus, preparing treatments for state floras, including the Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States launched by Le Roy Abrams.

From 1934 to 1950 he worked with Jens C. Clausen and William M. Hiesey at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University and together the trio produced the classic series of papers on "Experimental Studies on the Nature of Species". In 1950 he took up the position of head curator at the New York Botanical Garden and in 1958 was named director, but took a leave of absence later that year to serve as program director of systematic biology at the National Science Foundation (NSF). After twelve years with the NSF, he retired with his wife to New Zealand, where he helped establish an arboretum near their home in Tauranga. In 1979 they moved to Medford, Oregon. Later in a retirement home near Newport Beach, California, he died at the age of 92. As a botanist, he collected widely in the western United States, mainly in California, but also made several trips to Mexico.

Sources:
J. Ewan, 1996, "David Daniel Keck (1903-1995)", Taxon, 45(1): 147-150.