Botanist ended his adventurous life in a Swiss clinic, listening to Beethoven

When the celebrated plant ecologist David Goodall was interviewed on his 104th birthday last month, his response was typically forthright. ‘‘I greatly regret having reached that age. I’m not happy. I want to die. It’s not sad, particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented.’’

As it happened, he was not ‘‘prevented’’, even though there were those who had opposed him travelling to Switzerland to end his life. While doctors considered whether to try to detain him in Australia, he boarded a plane in Perth, wearing a jumper that bore the slogan ‘‘ageing disgracefully’’, on May 2. He was not terminally ill, but had been a member of Exit International for 20 years. The group created an online crowdfunding page to pay to upgrade his ticket from economy to business class and rapidly reached its target.

He flew to Bordeaux, where he visited family for the last time, and then on to Basel, where the staff of the Life Cycle Service helped him to bring to an end the remarkable life of a renowned scientist who was married three times, loved acting, but never bought a television and shunned radio.

Only two years earlier he had been fighting for the right to carry on working, at the Centre for Ecosystem Management at Edith Cowan University in Perth. He had been one of the first scientists to talk about the greenhouse effect, and was regarded as the godfather of ‘‘quantitative ecology’’, applying the numbercrunching rigour of statistics and mathematics to his discipline. He developed computer programs for classifying vegetation and modelling ecosystems, and was an early adopter of the Fortran programming language. He was still programming for his modelling work until two years ago.

The scope of his research was vast, taking in the growth rates of lettuce and cocoa; the growth of lichen in Lapland; the management of eucalyptus forests; the alpine grasslands of Victoria; desert seed banks; and the desert ecosystems of northern Egypt, among many others. Perhaps his overarching achievement was his editorship of the 36-volume standard work Ecosystems of the World.

David William Goodall was one of two children born in Edmonton, north London. He went to Imperial College London, choosing botany over biology because he felt it was a stronger department.

In the 1930s he travelled extensively in Europe and spent a month in Dortmund, Germany, where he recalled living with a ‘‘Nazi family’’. Graduating in 1935, he started working on his PhD under the auspices of the Research Institute of Plant Physiology,