David Edward Reichle (born October 19, 1938) is an American ecologist who worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

[citation needed] Reichle joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee as an Atomic Energy Commission Postdoctoral Fellow in 1964 and worked in the Radiation Ecology Section of the Health Physics Division as a biophysicist in 1966.

He was appointed ORNL Associate Director for Life and Environmental Sciences (1990-2000) and Vice-President of Lockheed Martin Energy Systems.

Reichle’s early research focused on the pathways of movement of radionuclides in the environment,[8] studying invertebrate food chains and mineral cycles in forest ecosystems.

He began studying the bioenergetics of forest decomposer and herbivore trophic levels with pioneering analyses of the energetics of natural populations and whole ecosystems.

Reichle has authored over 100 scientific publications and several books in the areas of the environmental behavior of radionuclides, forest ecology, and energy fluxes and carbon cycling in ecosystems.

He was a US delegate to UNESCO meetings on Productivity of Forest Ecosystems in Brussels (1969), Delhi (1971), Lund (1976); the 1999 Symposium on the History of Radioecology in Vienna (1999); and the Greenhouse Gas Technology Conference in Cairns, Australia (2000).

He was a participant in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

As chairman, he led the Trustees in completing the Walls of Jericho acquisition in the Southern Cumberland Mts., and Pogue Creek and Skinner Mt.