It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of David Wake, professor emeritus University of California Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, on April 29, 2021. David Wake was co-founder and director of AmphibiaWeb. He spent his life studying the biology of amphibians, particularly salamanders, and he inspired countless undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and colleagues. He was one of the first scientists to understand that declining and disappearing amphibians appeared to be a global phenomenon, which he began expressing at the first World Congress of Herpetology in 1989. In 1990, he co-sponsored (with Harold Morowitz) the first international meeting to discuss the decline of amphibians across the world (National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, California, 1990), and became the first chairman of the Task Force on Declining Amphibian Populations. With the launch of AmphibiaWeb in 2000, David sought to bring the conservation science and basic fact-based biology of all amphibians to a single place where everyone could access the information freely. Until his last day, David remained a tirelessly dedicated scientist and ally of the amphibians of the world.
