Ian Richard Swingland (born 2 November 1946) is a British conservationist, convicted in 2017 of conspiring to commit fraud by false representation. He founded DICE (Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology) at the University of Kent in 1989, recognised as one of the first interdisciplinary research and postgraduate training institutes in the world concentrating on biodiversity, communities and sustainable development. While at DICE he served as director and was elected to the first chair in Conservation Biology in the United Kingdom.
Early years and education
Swingland is the only child of Flora Mary (née Fernie), who was recruited by Special Operations Executive before working as a senior lecturer in the Polytechnic of Central London, and Hugh Maurice Webb Swingland, an electrical engineer who rose to the rank of Director, MoD Procurement Executive after serving in the Royal Navy North Sea minesweepers during World War II. Swingland was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, London, followed by London, Edinburgh and Oxford Universities. At London University, he read zoology and social anthropology and published his first scientific paper on the location of memory in a vertebrate in Nature in 1969 while an undergraduate. After working for Shell Research International for a short time, he took a PhD in ecology in the Forestry and Natural Resources Department at Edinburgh University on a Department for International Development Scholarship and subsequently worked as a research and management biologist in the Kafue National Park, Zambia for the Government.
Career
In 1974, Swingland joined Oxford University Zoology Department for five years to work on the giant tortoises of Aldabra Atoll, western Indian Ocean. He has been, or is, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, University of Florence, University of Auckland, Manchester Metropolitan University and Beijing Forestry University and has worked as a research mathematician for Royal Dutch Shell at Sittingbourne, in Kent, England. In 1979 he was appointed to the University of Kent to create their Natural Science Continuing Education programme and ten years later founded DICE, The Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, a multi-disciplinary research and conservation training institute. The name was chosen in recognition of Swingland's friend, Gerald Durrell, and his commitment to conservation. Swingland retired from the university in 1999 but serves as professor emeritus.
Swingland founded the Herpetological Conservation Trust in 1989 (renamed the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust), an international NGO and the international journal Biodiversity and Conservation in 1992, the first multidisciplinary journal in biodiversity management and sustainable development. He also co-founded a number of companies which apply business and market approaches to benefiting conservation, biodiversity and people on an integrated, sustainable and ethical basis and co-founded, with Neil Wates and Sir Colin Spedding, the think-tank RURAL (Responsible Use of Resources in Agriculture and on the Land) in 1980. One of these companies, Sustainable Forestry Management Limited, was incorporated in Bermuda in October 1999 and liquidated in 2011.