The Distinguished Service Citation is given annually to recognize long and distinguished service to the Ecological Society of America, to the larger scientific community, and to the larger purpose of ecology in the public welfare.

This year we are pleased to have selected Jim Reichman for the 2004 Distinguished Service Citation. Over his career, Jim has contributed to the ESA and the discipline of ecology in many ways; he has served on a variety of committees and boards and is currently Chair of the Publications Committee and an Editor for Ecological Applications. In the early 1990’s he served as a Program Director at the NSF and a few years later took a courageous step out of the comfort zone of a successful academic life to become the Asst Director of the ‘fledgling’ National Biological Survey. However his greatest professional accomplishment has been his leadership role as Director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Jim assumed the directorship of NCEAS shortly after it was established and was instrumental in getting establishing the initial vision for NCEAS, and its present role and prominence reflects Jim efforts, imagination and leadership.

Anyone who has spent time at NCEAS, read the papers that have come from activities there, interacted with (or hired) an NCEAS postdoc can point to ways in which NCEAS has changed the culture of ecological science. Most of the responsibility for the success of NCEAS can be attributed to Jim Reichman. Though he is quick to credit the contributions of others, it is well acknowledged that Jim has created an environment that has transformed both the national and international culture of ecology. NCEAS has extended its influence beyond traditional ecology into areas such as bioinformatics, conservation and natural resource management applications, and environmental education and outreach for schoolchildren. Most importantly, it has brought together environmental scientists from all over the world and the result has been an unparalleled time of interaction, collaboration, and community consensus.

Jim’s success as Director of NCEAS has not come at the cost of his research and scholarship; his current work with Eric Seabloom on restoration of California grasslands is both novel and controversial. Their work has shown that native species are highly competitive and that assemblages of native species can be resistant to invasion has challenged the prevailing dogma about grassland composition and restoration in California.Their work has attracted considerable national attention, including a recent news article in Science. His continuing involvement in research, teaching and mentoring of students and post-doctoral fellows has contributed to his success as Director of NCEAS.

Jim’s passion for the diversity of ecological science, dedication to promoting collaboration, warm and friendly personality and personal commitment toward interdisciplinary and novel approaches to ecology has created at NCEAS a very special place. We all benefit from his vision and dedication and it is a pleasure to recognize his contributions by awarding him the Distinguished Service Award.

Distinguished Service Citation Award Subcommittee: Kay Gross (Chair), Nelson Hairston, Jr., Bob Holt, Bea Van Horne, Paul Dayton, and Peter Groffman

The Mercer Award recognizes an outstanding ecological research paper published by one or more “younger” researchers (under 40 at the time of publication). The 2004 Award is for the authors of “Biodiversity, Invasion Resistance, and Marine Ecosystem Function: Reconciling Pattern and Process” (John J. Stachowicz, Heather Fried, Richard W. Osman and Robert B. Whitlatch; Ecology 83:2575-2590)

The connection between structure and function within ecosystems is a grand challenge for ecologists, and understanding the role of invasive species in that context is critical for management and conservation. John Stachowicz, Heather Fried and their colleagues have conducted one of the very few studies in marine environments that explicitly test effects of diversity on ecosystem function. It contains elegant field experiments using sessile marine invertebrates that are well-linked to surveys conducted in natural habitats of Long Island Sound, with clear articulation of complex results. This work also addresses an issue of key practical importance – the degree to which diversity per se affects invasion resistance. Increased diversity led to a heightened resistance to invasion, primarily because more speciose assemblages utilized more of the available limiting resource (attachment space) and buffered against temporal fluctuations in resource use by individual species. The research is particularly elegant because species-specific effects on invasibility are dissected from the impacts of community level diversity, and the mechanism of the diversity effect is identified. The Stachowicz et al. work is a seminal contribution that will stimulate many further studies in marine systems, as well as comparisons to ongoing, more mature efforts that are exploring the functional consequences of diversity in terrestrial environments.

John Stachowicz is Assistant Professor in the Section of Ecology and Evolution, University of California – Davis; he holds a Ph.D. (1998) from the University of North Carolina. Heather Fried is a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. Richard Osman is Curator in the Population and Community Ecology Group at the Academy of Natural Sciences Estuarine Research Center, and Robert Whitlatch is Prof­
essor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut.

Distinguished Service Citation Award Subcommittee: Steve Heard (Chair), Sally Holbrook, James Morris, Jean Richardson, Andy Sih, Ellen Simms, and Mike Willig

The William S. Cooper Award is given by the Society in honor of one of the founders of modern plant ecology. The Cooper Award is made annually for an outstanding contribution in geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of organisms along environmental gradients. The 2004 recipients are Drs. John W. Williams, Bryan N. Shuman, and Thompson Webb III for their 2001 paper, “Dissimilarity analyses of Late-Quaternary vegetation and climate in eastern North America”, published in Ecology 82:3346-3362.

The fossil record of the Late Quaternary has yielded an important, yet enigmatic, ecological observation: plant and animal communities have existed in the recent past that have no modern counterparts in terms of composition. The underlying causes of these peculiar biotic assemblages have stimulated debate in the ecological and paleoecological communities for the past four decades. In their paper, Williams, Shuman, and Webb address the problem using an elegant combination of numerical analyses, mapping techniques, paleoclimate simulations, and the extensive North American Pollen Database. They used the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation dissimilarity during the period to evaluate alternative hypotheses concerning the underlying causes of the peculiar vegetation. Hypothesis-testing of this kind is difficult, but the authors developed and applied an ingenious approach, comparing maps of vegetation dissimilarities with maps of climate dissimilarity from present (using simulated paleoclimates, which are the only existing non-circular means for doing this). The spatial and temporal patterns are revealing and provocative, indicating that vegetation composition is contingent on climate, and that unique biotic assemblages will arise when unique climatic combinations occur. The study represents an important step forward in our understanding of vegetational responses to environmental change at broad spatial and temporal scales, and sets a new standard for paleoecological syntheses in other regions and time periods. It is highly relevant to global change concerns, because climatic gradients of the future may be very different from those of the past few thousand years, and so we may expect many existing biotic assemblages to disappear as new assemblages emerge under new climates.

The paper developed from research done while Williams and Shuman were graduate students in Webb’s lab at Brown University, where Webb is Professor of Geological Sciences. Williams is currently an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, and Shuman is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota.

W.S. Cooper Award Subcommittee: Judie Bronstein (chair), Laura Hyatt, Sara Hotchkiss, Miles Silman, Scott Collins, and David Peterson

The Eugene P. Odum Award recognizes an ecologist for outstanding work in ecology education. Through teaching, outreach, and mentoring activities, recipients of this award have demonstrated their ability to relate basic ecological principles to human affairs.
The Odum Award subcommittee wishes to congratulate this year’s awardee for the Eugene P. Odum Award in Ecological Education, Dr. Richard “Dick” Root. The subcommittee was uniform in their praise for an ecologist whose primary contribution to the field of ecological education has been through setting an example as a researcher and a mentor. Dick has served as a mentor to 33 Ph.D. students and 4 M.S. students. Those cold numbers don’t tell half of the story, however. The list reads like a “who’s who” in ecology. Further, those students carried with them a mentoring model that they now employ, a deeply personal and enthusiastic view of nature and the role of being a naturalist in the field of ecology.

Dick’s students know themselves as “Rootlets”. One former student even wrote about his experience with Dick as being the “Root Cause” for his enjoyment and success as an ecologist. Former students confess that they were not even interested in ecology as a discipline until they either met and worked with Dick or were in his Field Ecology class at Cornell. Then, after as few as two lectures, they found themselves “hooked”. Many of these students confess to shamelessly copying Dick’s model in the classroom and in the field in terms of mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students. With such an ever widening network of deeply devoted and enthusiastic mentees, it is obvious that Dick Root’s impacts on ecological education are enormous.

The deeply personal and individual relationship that Dick built with each of his students was vitally important to them. One former student wrote, “Almost as if we were his biological children, Dick doted on us and, I am certain, lost sleep over our inevitable shortcomings, wondering where he might have gone wrong. Today I find myself treating my own students with similar regard.” Another former student writes, “Believing I was a pretty good writer, I proudly presented Dick with the first draft of my dissertation. He wrote just one comment on the Introduction: “Yech!” That one word (and several analogues later on in the draft) served me as a one-trial learning experience in how to write ecology papers without either fluff or excessive dryness.”

Dick Root also shines as a classroom teacher. His course, Field Ecology, at Cornell has received the highest student evaluation possible. The teaching model for this course emphasizes a cooperative and relaxed learning environment that still conveys the rigor of ecological inquiry. One student wrote on their evaluation form “I learned to think critically about ecological questions, and I even learned important life skills”. Former students conveyed story after story about how Dick’s enthusiasm and joy would be evident in all lectures, regardless of the subject.

It is impossible to enumerate the impact that Dick Root has had on the field of ecology and ecological education. Countless former students and their students and so on are being influenced by the model that he has laid out in which he encourages students to first observe in the field and from those observations commence further inquiry. His lab housed students involved in a wide range of ecological work, and therefore inculcated a curiosity and respect for ecology in the broadest possible terms.
It is with great pleasure that we award Dick Root with the 2004 Eugene P. Odum Award for Ecological Education.

Eugene P. Odum Award Subcommittee: Linda Wallace (Chair), Charlene D’Avanzo, Margaret Carreiro, Bruce Grant, Peter Feinsinger, and Kathy Winnett-Murray

The objective of the Corporate Award of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) is to identify and recognize a corporation, business, division, program, or an individual of a company for its accomplishments in incorporating sound ecological concepts, knowledge, and practices into its planning and operating procedures. This award was designed to encourage the use of ecological concepts in business and industry and to enhance communication among ecologists and the private sector. The Corporate Award is made annually in one of the six categories; the category for 2004 was "Sustainability of Biological Resources in Terrestrial Environments." The committee sought examples of corporate entities whose land resource management reflects a sound foundation in basic ecological principles and science.

The ESA Corporate Award Committee has awarded the 2004 corporate Award to the Taylor Guitar company in El Cajon, California, based on their innovative process of applying finishes to their guitars as well as their sustainable use of wood. The company has made significant efforts to reduce the amount of pollutants released into the air during the finishing process. Taylor Guitars is a leader in the acoustic guitar industry. The company is known for revolutionizing the design and manufacture of high-end acoustic guitars with significant innovations that produce superior instruments. These innovations are the brainchild of luthier/inventor/company president and co-owner, Bob Taylor, who pioneered the use of CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) milling machines, Ultraviolet-cured finishes, laser cutters and various other high-tech procedures in the acoustic guitar building process. Their central innovation and demonstration of commitment to environmental responsibility was the groundbreaking development of a more environmentally friendly finish for guitars. Taylor was the first acoustic guitar manufacturer to develop a guitar finish curable with Ultraviolet-light. Prior to 1995, UV-curable finishes were available only for metal or plastic, not wood. Collaborating with a chemist, Taylor worked for years to develop a finish that was more resilient, more environmentally friendly, and more aesthetically pleasing than the lacquers commonly used on wooden instruments. The company also had to design and build its own curing ovens to accommodate the new, fume-reducing spray formula. In 1999, the San Diego Air Pollution Control District presented Taylor Guitars with an award for developing a system that greatly reduces the emission of volatile organic compounds into the air stream. Other examples of their commitment to environmental responsibility: A current project is developing a robotic spraying system that is much more efficient than hand spraying, to minimize waste of materials. Another new project in the development stages will allow them to procure an important wood – Honduran Mahogany – by purchasing large quantities of storm-felled trees under the auspices of the C.I.T.E.S. treaty. In the past, in order to get Hawaiian koa they have worked with landowners who have the blessings of Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, and The Hawaiian Island Forestry Association. Occasionally they buy African ebony when the African government auctions a load that was felled during the construction of a road or something similar. In 2001, they donated a portion of sales for the Limited Edition Liberty Tree Guitars to American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation organization.

Corporate Award Subcommittee: Kate Lajtha (Chair), Joan Ehrenfeld, Greg Aplet, Laura Huenneke and Scott Stoleson

The Sustainability Science Award of the Ecological Society of America recognizes the authors of the peer reviewed paper published in the past five years that makes the greatest contribution to the emerging science of ecosystem and regional sustainability through the integration of ecological and social sciences. One of the most pressing challenges facing humanity is the sustainability of important ecological, social and cultural processes in the face of changes in the forces that shape ecosystems and regions.

Unprecedented directional changes in climate, human population, technology and social and economic institutions alter the structure and functioning of current ecological and social systems. The Sustainability Science Award recognizes the role that science can contribute to addressing these challenges. This is the first year that the award is being given, and it will continue to be given annually.

The subcommittee has selected Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan Foley, Carl Folke, and Brian Walker as the 2004 Sustainability Science Award winners for their paper:
Scheffer, M., S. Carpenter, J. Foley, C. Folke, and B. Walker. 2001. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature, vol. 413: 591-596.

This review paper was selected because it clearly and succinctly presented the theoretical basis for conditions that would give rise to alternative steady states in ecosystems and evidence from multiple field studies that was consistent with this theory. For each of these studies the authors describe a range of factors that led to loss of resilience prior to the shift to a new state. By focusing on the determinants of resilience rather than the specific triggers that caused the change, it is likely that the results can be generalized more broadly.

Sustainability Science Award Subcommittee: Terry Chapin (Chair), Kathryn Cottingham, Erika Zavaleta, Garry Peterson, Gary Kofinas, Roz Naylor

E. Lucy Braun was an eminent plant ecologist and the first woman president of the Ecological Society of America. Besides describing and mapping the deciduous forest regions of eastern North America, Lucy Braun served as a dedicated teacher and role model to her students. To honor her, this award is presented to a student for the outstanding poster presentation at the Society’s annual meeting.

The 2004 winner of the E. Lucy Braun Award is Pedro Flombaum for his poster “The role of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning: a removal experiment in the Patagonian steppe, Argentina.” This work is based on Pedro’s doctoral research at the University of Buenos Aires under the supervision of O. E. Sala. Pedro presented results from species removal experiments in natural ecosystems in the Patagonian Steppe that showed that the effects of biodiversity on aboveground net primary production in natural ecosystems are larger than reported using artificial communities. The Braun judges were impressed with Pedro’s poster in that it included new creative work, he described earlier reconstructive studies and departed from those earlier studies using plant removals from natural systems to understand the relationship between biodiversity and productivity, and the poster exhibited work based on a strong experimental design and included a sophisticated analysis. Judges commented that in discussing the poster with Pedro, he effectively guided them through the elements of the project as presented on the poster, explained the design and analysis clearly, and showed a strong grasp of prior related studies. Pedro received his B.Sc. in Biology from Buenos Aires University in 1997.

2004 Student Awards Selection Committee: Christopher F. Sacchi (Chair), Nancy Eyster-Smith, Paul Marino, J. Alan Yeakley

Members present:
Bill Schlesinger (President), Ann Bartuska (Past-President), Jerry Melillo (President-Elect), Jim Clark (Vice President for Science), Norm Christensen (Vice President for Finance), Alison Power (Vice President for Public Affairs), Carol Brewer (Vice President for Education and Human Resources), Osvaldo Sala (Member-at-Large), Margaret Palmer (Member-at-Large), Edward Johnson (Member-at-Large).

Members of the 2004–2005 Board present:
Nancy Grimm (incoming President-elect; 25 May only), David Inouye (incoming Secretary), Gus Shaver (incoming Vice President for Science), Dee Boersma (incoming Member-at-Large)

Staff present:
Katherine McCarter (Executive Director), Cliff Duke (Director of Science), Nadine Lymn (Director of Public Affairs), David Baldwin (Managing Editor), Elizabeth Biggs (Director of Finance), Jason Taylor (Director of Education), Sue Silver (Editor)

Monday, 24 May 2004

I. ROLL CALL

A. The Governing Board unanimously adopted the proposed agenda.

II. DINNER MEETING

Guest speaker: Jim Turner (Minority Counsel, House Science Committee) discussed the dynamics of science policy and funding in Congress. The current stalemate in appropriation bills is unprecedented in his (almost 30 years) experience. In response to questions he also discussed the politicization of science, how to move science into policy making, climate change, and the demise of the OTA.

III. RATIFICATION OF VOTES TAKEN SINCE THE NOVEMBER, 2003 MEETING

A. Minutes of the November, 2003 meeting: moved, seconded, adopted unanimously.

B. Awards nominations: moved, seconded, adopted unanimously.

The nominees were:
Eminent Ecologist Award: Dr. Sam McNaughton
Distinguished Service Citation: Dr. Jim Reichman
Corporate Award: Taylor Guitars
Mercer Award: Dr. John Stachowicz, H. Fried, R. W. Osman, and R. B. Whitlach
Cooper Award: Dr. Jack Williams, B. N. Shuman, and T. Webb III
Odum Award for Excellence in Ecology Education: Dr. Richard Root
(See also item XIII. Sustainability Science Award)

C. Genetically Engineered Organisms position paper: moved, seconded, adopted unanimously. It was suggested that this paper be sent to the European Union, the International Biosafety meeting, and NAFTA.

IV. REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

President Schlesinger reported that this has been a busy period, including activities such as testimony before Congress. Schlesinger signed a letter coordinated by the UCS on global warming. ESA weighed in on the peer review issue through comments to OMB. ESA was not invited to sign the letter about visa difficulties for international scientists initiated by the National Academy of Sciences. However the Society is aware of this issue. Information about this issue is available at ‹www7.nationalacademies.org/visas› and there is a link to this site on the ESA Portland meeting web site.

He wrote to Mary Clutter at NSF to support renewal of NCEAS.

V. REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND STAFF. (Only three issues are discussed here; the full report was distributed in writing before the meeting.)

A. Marketing

Director of Finance Elizabeth Biggs noted that ESA needs to make Frontiers self-sufficient over the next 8–10 years. ESA has initiated a number of marketing efforts to promote sales and attract advertising revenue. This spring a consultant was hired to help with this. About 70 libraries subscribe to Frontiers (vs. about 2000 for other ESA journals). To help increase that percentage, there is a form in each issue of Frontiers for subscribers to send to their libraries. ESA is also trying some direct-mail initiatives, and working with subscription agents.

One goal of Frontiers is to increase ESA membership, and indeed, membership is still growing (will probably be up about 300 this year, and was up about 300 last year). The Society is doing advertising at other professional meetings, and contacting authors who are not members.

B. NEON

Schlesinger reported on a February meeting at NSF that McCarter, Duke, and Schlesinger attended to express ESA’s interest in a partnership between ESA and NEON coordinators. Two groups have responded to a RFP for a NEON Coordinating Consortium. Schlesinger and staff met with a team developing a NEON proposal in connection with AIBS and conveyed ESA’s interest in being involved. AIBS subsequently indicated that they did not see a role for ESA at this time in the process. National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) is the other group that put in a proposal, and they were enthusiastic about involving ESA; Cliff Duke worked with them to develop the community engagement aspect of the proposal. There was some discussion about the history of ESA’s involvement in NEON. The Governing Board includes representatives of both groups submitting proposals to NSF, so discussion was limited in scope because of conflicts of interest.

C. Millennium Fund

Although Board members had committed to help increase the number of donors, it appears that there has been no success yet, so McCarter reminded Board members about their commitment. The fund currently contains $52,000. The fund generally receives contributions from the same group of traditional donors. She will send Board members a list of current donors and some cards to use to help solicit new ones.

Tuesday, 25 May 2004

VI. FINANCIAL UPDATES

McCarter presented the third-quarter financial report that shows a positive bottom line with some excess revenue over expense.

A. ESA Long-term Investments

Vice President for Finance Christensen reported that the endowment is currently about $855,000; part is restricted, set up by individuals for particular purposes (e.g., awards), part is Board-restricted (quasi-endowment, principal could be spent by decision of the Governing Board), and part is unrestricted. About $573,000 is invested in a value fund through Townley, in a relatively conservative way. About 3 years ago the Board voted to move about $500,000 to a growth fund with Riggs and Company; what is left of this fund is now valued at about $270,000. Christensen noted that it may be appropriate to move this money to Townley at some point.

Vice President for Finance Christensen wants guidance on spending policy. A conservative policy might be to spend about 5% of the endowment/year (about $40,000/yr). He suggests that a rolling 3-year average of 5% would be better policy, allowing some adjustments for annual variation in income. Another option suggested is that on 31 December we calculate a moving 3-year 5% average of the endowment principal, which can be considered available for the following year. The Board asked that a recommendation be brought back in August. Christensen believes that it is probably not appropriate to try and grow the endowment through investments.

Christensen raised the issue of the role of the Finance and Investments Committee. The Board agreed that this group needed to continue its oversight of investment policy.

Additional discussion raised the need for a development committee to work on increasing the endowment. It was suggested that the dormant Fund Raising Committee could be reactivated, perhaps with new members, to function as a development committee.

We currently have a $163,000 rainy day fund (unrestricted reserves); target is $250,000.

VII. PRESENTATION OF PROPOSED FY 2004–2005 BUDGET

McCarter reviewed the budgeting process that begins in April with staff reviewing the income and expenses, consulting with the VP for Finance. A draft budget is presented to the Board in May. Any additions or changes are reviewed by the Board in August and then presented to the Council for approval. McCarter provided an overview of assumptions, calculations of revenues and expenses, adjustments to the previous year’s budget, program adjustments, and activities not funded. There was considerable discussion about the costs of library subscriptions since the office must provide price changes to libraries in June.

Motion: That the print subscription rates for libraries be increased by 7%, with a similar consideration for online subscriptions. Seconded and approved unanimously.

A. Discussion of proposed program budget adjustments

While all ESA members in developed countries receive hard copies of Frontiers, it is now provided only electronically to developing countries because of the significant delivery problems (e.g., recently, none of 30 copies of Ecology sent to Brazil arrived at their destination). It will cost about $7000–8000 for printing and shipping to mail printed copies.

Motion: That we spend up to $10,000 to provide printed copies of Frontiers to members in developing countries. Seconded and approved unanimously.

The Board of Professional Certification has requested $3050 in addition to the funds provided each year for a meeting. This would make it possible, for example, to recruit at meetings of other societies.

Motion: That the request from the Board of Professional Certification for a $3050 increase in their annual budget be approved for 2 years, during which time we would like some evaluation of the effectiveness of the Certification program. Seconded and approved unanimously.

Carol Brewer brought a recommendation from the Women and Minorities in Ecology committee that the Society conduct a membership survey to update the 1992 survey. (M. M. Holland, D. M. Lawrence, D. J. Morin, C. Hunsaker, D. Inouye, A. Janetos, H. R. Pulliam, W. Robertson, and J. Wilson. 1992. Profiles of ecologists: results of a survey of the membership of the Ecological Society of America.)

Motion: That up to $10,000 be provided to plan and conduct a survey of our membership. McCarter was asked to find the most appropriate place to find this funding, including using the Millennium Fund. Motion seconded and approved unanimously.

IX. DISCUSSION OF FURTHER IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ECOLOGICAL VISIONS REPORT

A. Development of the draft plan for a Rapid Response Team

A plan to develop teams of ESA members who would be available to respond quickly to topical issues was reviewed. A suggested list of topics was presented. The Board proposed an additional area: Ecological implications of international conflicts and military activities (Duke has a long-standing interest in this area). It was also suggested that ESA institutionalize meetings of the rapid response teams during the annual meeting. Staff will proceed with implementation for the Rapid Response teams.

B. Fostering international collaborations among societies

President-Elect Melillo just returned from China, where he spoke with the current and upcoming presidents of the Chinese Ecological Society. They were enthusiastic about the idea of exchanging representatives to annual meetings, and about translating of selected ESA publications into Chinese. They have about 6000 members, and the Society is quite active (e.g., 16 committees). There is also a newly formed East Asian Federation of Ecological Societies (China, South Korea, Japan), that will have its first meeting in Korea in November. There is potential for ESA to link with this new organization.

It was suggested that ESA seek funds to support the travel of international students from the developing world to the Montreal meeting. This might be easier to do for a Canadian meeting than for one in the United States, given the current problems with obtaining visas for foreign visitors.

C. Translations of ESA publications

David Baldwin suggested the idea of partnering with some international journals, as is already done by some medical journals. ESA would provide advance notice of the table of contents to the partners, who could then decide which (if any) papers they might want to republish in their own journals. The international journal would decide if they wished to translate the articles or publish them in English.

D. Federation of the Americas

Member-at-Large Sala was asked to continue his role in spearheading the Federation of the Americas even after he leaves the Board in August.

E. Major public information campaign

This would be a major undertaking, since ESA would need to raise millions of dollars to do it adequately.

Motion: ESA should formalize implementation of a business plan for the public information campaign and this should be spearheaded by a subcommittee of ESA Vice Presidents and others. Motion approved unanimously.

It was noted that this would be a good activity in which to involve a development committee. Discussion also involved suggesting other organizations that might like to partner with ESA. It was noted that several other societies expressed interest in collaborating with ESA after a February briefing about the Visions Report. It is anticipated that the business plan will be developed by next May, and that an update on progress will be provided at the November Board meeting.

F. Emerging issues in ecological science

Duke presented a plan to support implementation of visions priorities. He proposes to develop a set of tool kits organized around particular themes. The goal would be to produce for each issue a comprehensive, linked set of products for a diverse set of audiences. The resulting tool kits would provide an “off the shelf” science resource for the proposed rapid response and public education capabilities, and also would make ecological science information available to a wide array of users. No Governing Board action taken at this time.

X. LUNCH SPEAKER

Guest speakers were Dr. Kathie Olsen (Associate Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Dr .Clifford Gabriel, Deputy to Dr. Olsen). Olsen and Gabriel described the organization and activities of OSTP and answered questions from the Governing Board.

XI. POLICY ISSUES

A. Proposed policy activity

Vice President for Science Clark and Vice President for Public Affairs Power have been discussing a project involving “ground truthing” the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. This project could potentially be sponsored and funded by the Public Affairs Committee. Since this project would involve the collection of primary data, both Vice Presidents agreed that the concept needed careful Governing Board discussion before proceeding. The Board requested additional information at the August meeting before making a decision.

B. Measuring effectiveness in public affairs

Director of Public Affairs Lymn presented results of a survey conducted last fall about how other societies deal with measuring the effectiveness of public affairs activities. The survey shows that ESA’s program is consistent with that of other similar societies and is well regarded in the policy community. It is difficult to quantify impact, but a process will be developed and implemented to clarify ESA’s policy objectives and outcomes each year.

XII. PUBLICATIONS ISSUES

A. Review of Editor-in-Chief for Ecology and Ecological Monographs

The Publications Committee is asked to provide a review of the volunteer Editors-in-Chief of ESA publications just prior to the end of the editor’s 3-year term. Editor-in-Chief Don Strong was reviewed and a report presented to the Governing Board. The Board noted its agreement with the very positive report.

Motion: to approve reappointment of the Editor-in-Chief for Ecology and Ecological Monographs to a 3-year term beginning retroactively on 1 January 2004 and extending to 31 December 2006. Seconded and approved unanimously. The Board noted that it agreed with the review committee that there is a need to increase representation of women and members of other underrepresented groups on the Editorial Board and is ready to work with Strong to identify appropriate new members. The report raised several issues for additional discussion that will be considered in August.

B. Web site policy

Request the Publications Committee to set up a web site subcommittee to review web site content and to report in August.

C. Blackwell Science textbook proposal

The Board reviewed a proposal from Blackwell Science for a joint project to develop a series of textbooks. The Board voted not to pursue this project.

D. Editor-in-Chief of the ESA Bulletin

The current Editor-in-Chief of the ESA Bulletin, Allen Solomon, will retire from that position in December 2004. The Publications Committee was asked to nominate a successor. The Committee recommended and the Board strongly endorsed the recommendation that Edward Johnson be appointed to this role.

Motion: To appoint Ed Johnson as Editor-in-Chief of the ESA Bulletin for a 3-year term (1 January 2005–31 December 2007). Seconded and approved unanimously.

E. ESA journal impact factors

The Board received a report on the rankings of ESA journals based on the ISI impact factors. Managing Editor Baldwin presented data on 3 years of rankings. ESA journals continue to be among the top group of cited journals.

XIII. NOMINATIONS FOR ESA OFFICES

The Nominations Committee, chaired by Past President Bartuska, has a preliminary list, which is still being refined. The Board can expect a slate to vote on in mid-June, and the final list of nominees will be advertised in the next issue of the ESA Bulletin.

XIV. NOMINATION FOR SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE AWARD

Motion: to approve the nomination of Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan Foley, Carl Folke, and Brian Walker as the 2004 Sustainability Science Award winners. Seconded and approved unanimously.

XV. AMICUS BRIEF—FAULKNER V. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

ESA has been asked by JSTOR to sign on to an amicus curiae brief they intend to submit on behalf of the NGS. This issue may have bearing on copyright law issues affecting JSTOR and other projects involving the retrospective digitization of print versions of scholarly materials.

Motion: To sign on to the amicus curiae brief after seeking advice from ESA corporate counsel. Seconded and approved unanimously.

XVI. MEETING ISSUES

A. Program Chairs for 2007 and 2008 ESA Annual Meetings

The Board reviewed a list of recommendations for persons to serve as Program Chair for the 2007 (San Jose) and 2008 (Minneapolis) Annual Meetings. The list was narrowed down and President Schlesinger will begin to contact the potential chairs.

B. Local Host for 2007 Annual Meeting

Motion: To appoint Rachel O’Malley as local host for the 2007 Annual Meeting. Seconded and approved unanimously.

XVII. NEW BUSINESS

A. San Jose: ESA and SER partnership

Motion: To accept the request by the Society for Restoration Ecology to hold a joint annual meeting in San Jose in 2007. Seconded and approved unanimously.

XVIII. ADJOURNMENT

Respectfully submitted,
David Inouye, Secretary-Elect

I. REPORTS OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND STAFF

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

ESA’s membership is growing. We passed the 8000 mark in 2003 and are expecting an additional 300 members again in 2004. ESA is a strong and growing society.

Our publications continue to be among the highest cited among environmental journals. Submissions to our journals continue to increase and the time to publication continues to decline. This year saw the successful transition to a long-awaited online manuscript submission and tracking system. Frontiers celebrated its second anniversary and was accepted for inclusion in the Thomson ISI database and is abstracted in a number of scientific databases. A new feature in 2003 on Ethical Issues proved so popular it has been issued as a book that will be available in time for the Annual Meeting in Portland.

The Ecological Visions project culminated in 2003 and is proving inspirational to the Governing Board and staff as we jointly plan ESA’s future directions. The Ecological Visions Committee report was completed in the fall and the recommendations of the report were reviewed during a Governing Board retreat. Priorities for implementation will result in an increased ability to respond to public policy issues, and an even greater attention to becoming a more international organization. A business plan to develop a major public information campaign is also underway.

ESA’s Science Program supported the work of the Visions Committee and was active on many other fronts. The highly successful Invasive Plants conference exceeded all expectations for attendance and the conference proceedings are in preparation. A new Issues in Ecology No.12 dealing with the impacts of atmospheric pollution on aquatic ecosystems was completed. Staff facilitated the peer review of a number of assessments requested by federal agencies dealing with issues such as a conservation assessment of the Greater Sage Grouse and sagebrush habitats and the historic range of variation of Rocky Mountain ecosystems. Planning is underway for a “summit” meeting of 12 major professional societies to develop a policy statement on data sharing and archiving.

Public affairs activities included the development and distribution of 12 Society statements on timely issues. Staff arranged over 20 meetings with congressional staff and executive branch offices to bring the expertise of ESA members to policy-makers. ESA’s leadership in the Biological and Ecological Sciences Coalition continues to put emphasis on science funding. Media attention to ESA’s activities continues to grow as evidenced by the steady increase of reporter-initiated calls. The Society’s press releases related to journal articles and the Annual Meeting are bringing press attention to ESA.

The expansion of ESA’s educational programs saw the addition of campus ecology chapters as part of the SEEDS program to increase the number and diversity of students in ecology. The project also organized two field trips to ecologically important sites, and awarded the first three undergraduate fellowships to provide a year-long research experience. Over 140 new education resource materials were catalogued and published on the ecoed.net library, and Volume 1 of Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) was offered on the Web and as a CD.

ESA’s web site was redesigned in 2003; a new Members Only page was added that posts job announcements before they are available to the public, and contains other features intended for ESA members.

The Annual Meeting in Savannah continued the trend for diversifying the scientific program offerings. The staff and program planners take the feedback from postmeeting evaluations very seriously and continuously look for ways to improve the meeting experience. The Portland meeting is shaping up to be the largest ESA Annual Meeting so far. In addition to the Annual Meeting, ESA has initiated the planning for a themed meeting in Mexico in 2006.

As a result of the Meeting of the Americas held just prior to the Savannah Annual Meeting, ESA organized the Federation of the Americas. The Federation, which is a collaboration of ecological societies in the Americas, has established a web site, a listserv, and has initiated several activities since its inception.

The reports of the staff offices that follow provide more detail on these highlights and on many other activities undertaken this year. Clearly this has been another active and exciting year at ESA. I truly appreciate the energy, dedication, and support of the members, the leadership, and the staff of ESA and look forward to working with you in the coming year.

Katherine S. McCarter, Executive Director

Back to Table of Contents

FINANCES/ MEMBERSHIP/ SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

ESA is getting bigger! The number of ESA members grew from 7834 members in 2002 to 8116 members in 2003 and we have already passed that figure for 2004. We expect to end our 2004 membership year with over 8400 members.
The newly designed ESA web site has been well received by members and was positively reviewed by the Scout Report. Plans are underway to upgrade our membership database for the 2005 membership and subscription year. Members will be able to renew their membership online and update mailing address and other information in real time.
We anticipate ending the 2003–2004 fiscal year with a positive bottom line despite a smaller than usual Annual Meeting in Savannah. Expenses have been kept within normal variances.

Membership and subscriptions for the calendar year 2003 were:

Total Membership: 8116
Domestic: 6858
Foreign: 1258

By Class:
Regular: 5887
Student: 1703
Developing Countries: 323
Life Members: 215
Emeritus: 311

Subscriptions:
Ecology Total: 5880
Members: 3832
Institutions: 2043
Other: 5

Ecological Applications Total: 3419
Members: 2152
Institutions: 1262
Other: 5

Ecological Monographs Total: 2822
Members: 1493
Institutions: 1325
Other: 4

Chapter Membership:
Quebec: 38
Rocky Mountain: 261
Southeastern: 483
Mid-Atlantic: 304
Western: 394

Section Membership:
Agroecology: 175
Applied: 592
Aquatic: 839
Asian: 89
Education: 328
International Affairs: 98
Long-Term Studies: 228
Paleoecology: 143
Physiological: 501
Plant Population Ecology: 302
Rangeland Ecology: 178
Soil Ecology: 282
Statistical Ecology: 267
Student: 297
Theoretical Ecology: 240
Vegetation: 449

Membership Affiliation:

Academic: 64%
Government: 12%
Nonprofit: 4%
Consultant: 5%
Other/left blank: 15%
Ethnicity:
White: 75%
Asian: 4 %
Hispanic: 3%
African American: less than 1%
Native American: less than 1%
Other/left blank: 18%

Gender:
Male: 58%
Female: 26%
Left blank: 16%

Administrative Staff:
Elizabeth Biggs, CFO, Director of Administration; Liz Brager, Manager Membership Services; Thet Oo, Database Coordinator; Frank McDonough, Associate Director, Information Systems; Zaw Aung, Webmaster; Min Tun, Financial Assistant.

Back to Table of Contents

FRONTIERS

Frontiers is now in the second year of publication and, in view of continuing positive feedback, the period August 2003–2004 has been one of consolidation of content and style, as well as of efforts to market the journal to a broader audience.

Content development

The contents of a publication such as Frontiers should never remain completely static, but should seek to introduce new initiatives from time to time. August 2003 saw the launch of the Ethical Issues series, a highly popular set of case studies and commentaries covering various ethical dilemmas that members may face in their daily lives. This series ended in June 2004, but the feedback was so positive that it was decided to put all 10 case studies together as a book, which will be on sale for the first time at the Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon (price $12.00).

This will be replaced by a new educational series, “Pathways to Scientific Teaching,” beginning in the August 2004 issue. Each month, this series will provide ideas for ways to use an article in the same issue of Frontiers for teaching (college level) using active, inquiry-based pedagogy, as well as methods of assessing student understanding at the end of the class.

Articles

Journal staff continue to approach authors and invite articles for the journal, so that a high proportion of the content has been negotiated to some extent. This means that a calculation of “solicited” vs. “unsolicited” articles is almost impossible.

Articles commissioned as of 14 July 2004

Articles agreed (with deadline dates): 60
Articles in negotiation: 56

Articles received July 2003–July 2004

Total articles received: 94
Articles accepted: 30
Articles rejected/withdrawn: 19
Articles currently in peer review: 45
Percent articles rejected/withdrawn: 39%

In March, Frontiers was accepted for inclusion in the Thomson ISI databases, and later also in the CAB bibliographic databases. The journal is also abstracted by BIOSIS and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.

Journal staff attended a number of conferences over the past 12 months, giving away sample issues, commissioning articles, and raising the profile of both Frontiers and ESA among different audiences. Conferences included the WSSA/ESA meeting “Invasive Plants in Natural and Managed Systems,” the XII World Forestry Congress, the American Library’s Association Midwinter Meeting, the NCSE meeting “Water for a Sustainable and Secure Future,” and the North American Benthological Society Annual Meeting,

Staff news

Advertising and Marketing Manager Jacqueline Byrd left the journal in January and this position has been changed to that of Advertising and Marketing Assistant. The post has recently been filled by Ivy Dunyoh, who has a B.A. in Public Relations from the University of Maryland. She will be working under the guidance of Elizabeth Biggs, and also in conjunction with an external Advertising and Marketing Consultant, Barbara Meyers.

Assistant Editor Julian Smith left the journal in February and was replaced by Ken Ferguson, who came to the ESA from a position as Senior Research Assistant at the Wildlife Habitat Council. Ken has an M.Sc. in Environmental Science from the University of South Florida and an M.E.S. from York University, Toronto.

Marketing and advertising

Meyers and Dunyoh have begun a number of new campaigns to increase library subscriptions and advertising in Frontiers, the two main sources of revenue outlined in the business plan. These include a brochure highlighting all ESA journals, sent to 6000 libraries, a direct-mail piece to over 200 potential and past employment advertisers, entries in subscription agents’ catalogues, targeted e-mail campaigns to potential groups of advertisers, and regular “house” ads in Frontiers.

Back to Table of Contents

OFFICE OF SCIENCE PROGRAMS

The Office of Science Programs continues its strong efforts in support of the ESA membership, the scientific community, and public agency scientists and decision makers. Our efforts in these areas include direct staff support to ESA’s Ecological Visions Committee, the ESA Panel on Vegetation Classification, and various Annual Meeting activities; support for a scientific conferences on management of invasive plants, and revision of a national plan for algal toxins and harmful algal blooms; support for scientific peer reviews of government agency studies; and contributions of Science staff to a variety of activities in the scientific community at large.
These activities, in collaboration with those of ESA’s Education, Public Affairs, and Publications programs, maintain ESA’s reputation as a source of reliable knowledge in ecological science. We appreciate the continuing support of the Society and the direct involvement of Society members in Science activities, and we welcome your advice, ideas, and energy.

Science support for ESA activities

Ecological Visions Committee

Science has supported ESA’s Ecological Visions Committee, chaired by Margaret Palmer, from its first meeting in January 2003 through the completion of the Committee report, Ecological Science and Sustainability for a Crowded Planet: 21st Century Vision and Action Plan for the Ecological Society of America, released in May 2004. The Committee identified three major visions, each with its own action areas and detailed recommendations: (1) Inform Decisions with Ecological Knowledge, (2) Advance Innovative and Anticipatory Research, and (3) Stimulate Cultural Changes for a Forward-Looking and International Ecology. The report is available on the Ecological Visions web site, ‹www.esa.org/ecovisions› and ESA members will have the opportunity to hear about the Governing Board’s plans in response to the report at a special session at the Annual Meeting in Portland. In addition, the Committee published a related article in Science (Ecology for a crowded planet, Science 304:1251) and a special issue of Frontiers, with a series of invited articles, is in preparation.

ESA Panel on Vegetation Classification

Science continues to provide support to the ESA Panel on Vegetation Classification, which is charged with facilitating and supporting the development, implementation, and use of a standardized vegetation classification for the U.S.; guiding professional ecologists in defining and adopting standards for vegetation sampling and analysis; collaborating with partner organizations to maintain scientific credibility of the classification through a peer review system; and promoting and facilitating international collaboration. The Panel has drafted its “Guidelines for Describing Associations and Alliances of the U.S. National Vegetation Classification” to provide expert opinion on standards for classifying vegetation at the floristic levels, and is in the process of finalizing the manuscript for submission to Ecological Monographs. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Vegetation Subcommittee has agreed in principle to accept the content of the Guidelines and will move forward with the Panel to have the Guidelines endorsed as a federal standard. The Panel conducted a workshop at the 2003 ESA Annual Meeting on analytical techniques for defining vegetation types under the National Vegetation Classification, and has continued the development and refinement of a system of databases to meet informatics needs (VegBank ‹www.vegbank.org›); and the development of a peer review system for plot data and vegetation types. The Panel continues to serve as a forum for discussion of issues related to the implementation of the developing national classification. For more information on the Panel activities, see the ESA Panel on Vegetation Classification Report to Council or visit ‹www.esa.org/vegweb/›

Issues in Ecology

The Science Office continues to provide staff support to the Issues in Ecology series. Issues in Ecology No. 12, “Impacts of Atmospheric Pollution on Aquatic Ecosystems,” by Swackhamer et al., was completed and sent to the printer at the end of June 2004. Another Issues in Ecology on principles of parasite ecology that relate to conservation biology is under consideration, and the Editorial Board is also exploring potential Pan American topics.

Annual Meeting activities

Science is organizing or participating in a number of activities at the 2004 Annual Meeting. These include a workshop on Introduction to VegBank: An Online Public Archive for Vegetation Plots, an evening session on Ecological Metadata, a symposium, Fighting the Odds: the Challenge to Save the Sagebrush Biome, and a special session on the Ecological Visions project.

Scientific conferences

Invasive Plants in Natural and Managed Systems: Linking Science and Management

The Science Office supported ESA’s highly successful participation in this conference, held on 3–7 November 2003 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The conference, developed in cooperation with the Weed Science Society of America and many other scientific societies, Federal and state agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, drew ~750 attendees from 30 countries. Meeting proceedings are in preparation and will appear as a special issue of Weed Science; an article is also being prepared for submission to Frontiers.

In a related effort, Science staff assisted in implementing and participated in the Fifth Annual National Invasive Weeds Awareness Week. Over 100 participants from around the country came to Washington, D.C., on 23–27 February 2004, to learn about on-going weed initiatives and promote greater awareness of weed issues in the agencies and in Congress.

Harmful Algal Blooms workshop and plan

The Science Office continues its efforts supporting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the revised National Plan for Marine Biotoxins and Harmful Algae, first issued in 1993. Under a cooperative agreement, Office staff helped organize and participated in a workshop in Charleston, South Carolina, 21–25 March 2004. The workshop, attended by ~50 invitees, reviewed progress made in the last decade toward achieving the goals of the 1993 plan, and set the stage for issuing a revised plan later this year. Rhonda Kranz is working with a steering committee chaired by Don Anderson of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and John Ramsdell of NOAA’s Charleston, South Carolina laboratory, to complete the revised plan, and Cliff Duke serves on the steering committee.

Support to the scientific community

Peer review support

The Science Office is managing the scientific peer review of a set of eight assessments of the historic range of variation of Rocky Mountain ecosystems for the U.S. Forest Service’s Region 2. Duncan Patten is chairing the review and each report is being reviewed by Patten and four other reviewers. Four reports (Medicine Bow National Forest, Big Horn National Forest, Pike and San Isabel National Forests, and Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests) have been reviewed and reports submitted to the Forest Service. One other report has been completed and the review is in progress, and three additional reports are being completed by the authors and will be reviewed in the future.
In addition, in the last year, Science Office staff have facilitated peer reviews of a conservation assessment of Greater Sage Grouse and sagebrush habitats, a Forest Service response to a Data Quality Act based challenge of management recommendations for the Northern Goshawk, and a demographic report on the Northern Spotted Owl.

National Parks Ecological Research Fellowship Program

The National Parks Ecological Research (NPER) Fellowship Program is a partnership of ESA, the National Park Foundation (NPF), and the National Park Service and is funded through a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The program encourages and supports outstanding postdoctoral research in ecological sciences related to the flora of U.S. National Parks, Monuments, Seashores, and other sites administered by the National Park System. The Science Office supports the advertising, application, and review process, while NPF supports the financial management of the fellowships. The Review Committee, chaired by Kay Gross, met at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara on 19–22 November 2003 to select three new fellows and hear presentations from most of the nine current fellows regarding their research. This year’s recipients, chosen from 34 applicants, are Mac Coffman of the University of Minnesota, Jennifer Funk of Stanford, and Kathleen Kay of UCSB. Information and application materials for the 2004 NPER Fellowships (due 1 October 2004) are available at ‹www.esa.org/nper/›

Society summit on data sharing and archiving policies

Science Office staff will support a 3-day “summit” meeting on 27–29 September 2004 in Washington, which will include the leadership of 12 major professional societies involved in organismal biology, with the goal of developing a policy statement on data sharing and archiving, and a preliminary roadmap for implementation by the societies. A second goal is to identify technical issues related to implementation, for discussion in potential future workshops. ESA will host the meeting, and the Meridian Institute is providing facilitation services.

Embassy Science Fellows

The Science Office continues to work with the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) to manage the U.S. Department of State’s Embassy Science Fellows Program, which places U.S. government scientists at embassies overseas to provide expertise, advice, and assistance on science and technology related issues. Office staff are working with FAS staff to explore options for new activities, for example, possibly inviting Embassy Science Fellows to present some of their work at ESA meetings.

Sustainable Resources Roundtables

Science staff represent ESA on the Sustainable Rangelands Roundtable (SRR) ‹sustainablerangelands.cnr.colostate.edu/› and the Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable (SWRR) ‹water.usgs.gov/wicp/acwi/swrr/›. Lori Hidinger chairs the SRR Outreach Working Group and serves on the Steering Committee; SRR had its 16th meeting the week of 26 April. The SRR is moving into a new phase and activities include drafting a charter for this next phase, creating a conceptual model of the ecological, economic, and social systems on rangelands and how the indicators fit, developing an outline for a report on the nation’s rangelands, and working with the Federal agencies to ensure that the report is written. Although Lori is no longer on the staff of ESA, we plan to continue our relationship with SRR through her.

Rhonda Kranz serves on the SWRR steering committee and chairs a working group on developing a conceptual framework and criteria for development of sustainable water resource indicators. Recent meetings of the SWRR have been 13–14 November 2003, in Washington, D.C., where participants worked on draft criteria and a process to develop a list of potential indicators, and 19–20 March 2004 in Palo Alto, California. Agency, business, NGO, and academic representatives have attended the meetings and have committed to being part of SWRR and its development. Kranz and other committee members recently published a paper on their conceptual framework in Water Resources Update (February 2004), a publication of the Universities Council on Water Resources. ESA has been discussing the possibility of collaborating with the SWRR on a future workshop.
 
Plant Conservation Alliance

ESA, along with many other professional societies, arboreta, and other organizations, is a Cooperator with the Plant Conservation Alliance, a cooperative program of a number of Federal agencies, which seeks to address problems related to native plant conservation and restoration. Science represents ESA at Alliance meetings.

Other activities in the scientific community

Science staff also participate in the scientific community in ways that help communicate ESA’s capabilities to the community and in turn inform the efforts of staff in the projects and activities summarized above. For example, Rhonda Kranz chairs the Board of Directors of the Biodiversity Project, and serves on the Board of the D.C. Environmentors Project. Cliff Duke serves as President of the Chesapeake-Potomac Chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). He also served as a judge for the 2004 Secretary of Defense Annual Environmental Awards; is a reviewer for EPA’s National Student Design Competition for Sustainability Focusing on People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3 Awards); and was recently appointed to EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, which advises EPA’s Office of Research and Development research program.

SBI Committee

The SBI Steering Committee continues to provide guidance and support for the efforts of the Science Office. The Committee is currently chaired by Cathy Pringle (University of Georgia) and co-chaired by Jim Clark (Duke University). Committee members include Tracy Benning (University of San Francisco), Elizabeth Chornesky (Consultant), Laurie Drinkwater (Cornell University), Laura Huenneke (Northern Arizona University), Garth Redfield (South Florida Water Management District), Ricardo Rozzi (Parque Etnobotanico Omora, Chile), and Carolyn Sieg (U.S. Forest Service). We thank them for their continuing contributions.

Science Office Staff: Cliff Duke, Director of Science, Lori Hidinger, Program Manager; Rhonda Kranz, Program Manager

Back to Table of Contents

PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE

Over the past year, ESA public affairs activities focused on conveying ecological information and resources to the media and to Congress, working with the broad scientific community to foster support for science, publicizing the Society’s activities, and outreach to ESA members.

Highlights

1) Public Affairs Office (PAO) staff met and facilitated meetings with over 20 Congressional and Executive Branch offices on issues important to the ecological community.

2) Developed and distributed 12 Society statements on timely issues such as NSF’s NEON Project and proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act.

3) Co-sponsored public events on genetically engineered organisms and essential fish habitat.
4) Developed a position statement on peer review endorsed by the broad biological community and widely distributed to Congress and the media.

5) Continued leadership of the Biological Ecological Sciences Coalition.

6) Added new journals to the ecology/biology cluster of JSTOR.

Policy

Statements: Thanks to ESA’s Policy Analyst, Maggie Smith, (who also serves as JSTOR Project Manager, see below), the Society continued to increase its involvement in relevant environmental policy issues. PAO developed and distributed 12 ESA statements. Of particular note these included:

1) A position statement on peer review, hand-delivered to all congressional offices, which received the endorsement of over a dozen prestigious organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Fisheries Society

2) Public comment on proposed changes to federal peer review which was covered by the Washington Post

3) A letter from ESA’s President urging support for the House appropriators’ proposal for NSF which included much stronger support for biology and funding for NEON (which the Senate version did not)

4) Public comments on proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act which would revoke barriers to trade in endangered species

5) A letter of support for legislation to increase funding for hypoxia research

6) Public comments on the National Marine Fisheries Service’s new policy for hatchery-raised salmon

• Hill Meetings: Over the year, PAO staff, Public Affairs Committee members, Governing Board members, and other ESA members, visited with over 20 Congressional and Executive Branch offices, including discussions with representatives of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Science Foundation.
  
  
• ESA again this year participated in the annual Coalition for National Science Funding Capitol Hill Exhibition and Reception. The event featured over 30 exhibitors—including ESA member Timothy Schowalter of Louisiana State—and showcased research made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation. Over 300 Congressional staff, Members of Congress, White House and NSF officials attended the event. Staff from the Senate Agriculture Committee and the House Science Committee and from OSTP were particularly interested in the ESA exhibit which featured Schowalter’s research on insects and forest health.
  
  
• Nadine Lymn, Director of Public Affairs, together with Adrienne (Froelich) Sponberg of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), continued to co-chair the Biological Ecological Sciences Coalition (BESC), working to raise awareness among the White House and Congress about the state of funding for the nonmedical biological sciences. BESC organized a special federal briefing for members of the biological community during a congressional visits event and also presented Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) with an award recognizing his strong support of the Department of Agriculture’s National Research Initiative competitive grants program.
  
  
• ESA Vice President for Public Affairs Alison Power and other ESA members participated in the 9th Annual Congressional Visits Day, meeting with nine Congressional offices to encourage support for science funding overall and for ecological research specifically.
  
  
• PAO continued to track and report on the status of legislation, federal science appropriations, and environmental policy activities in the national and international arena through its bi-weekly Policy News. In March, Lymn teamed up with staff from AIBS to write a chapter for the annual publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS Report XXIX: Research & Development FY 2005. The ESA/AIBS chapter analyzed the nonmedical biological science elements of the President’s fiscal year 2005 budget.
  
  
• At the request of the Governing Board, Lymn prepared a short report, “Measuring effectiveness in public affairs” which laid out ways to evaluate progress and the necessary emphasis on relationship building across a range of policy professionals.

Press

• Press preparations for the 2004 Annual Meeting have included press releases highlighting symposia and oral sessions and working with university and agency public information officers to generate additional publicity for the meeting.
  
  
• Coverage of the ESA Annual Meeting held in Savannah, Georgia, generated over 40 stories. Among the news outlets covering the conference were: Science, Science News, BioMedNet, a local CBS affiliate, and the Savannah Morning News. (ESA does not have a media clipping service; there was more coverage than we are able to track.)
  
  
• PAO staff continued to build on its media contacts this year and issued over 20 press releases highlighting Society activities (GEO Position Paper, Visions Report), journals (Frontiers, Ecology, etc.), and the Annual Meeting. Drinkard also participated in the National Association of Science Writers Meeting in Seattle, Washington as well as the AAAS meeting.
  
  
• The media’s growing awareness of the Society as a scientific resource was reflected in the steady influx of reporter-initiated calls throughout the year. Inquiries came from both the popular (e.g., Rolling Stone Magazine, ABC.com, National Geographic) and scientific press (Nature, Science) and covered a wide range of topics including West Nile virus, reef ecology, and drought. Over 70 reporters subscribe to ESA’s online suite of journals. In addition, Public Affairs Officer Drinkard was invited to review entries for the prestigious AAAS Science Journalism awards.
  
  
• Several ESA press releases were especially popular with the press including one addressing invasive species (800 hits by the media) and another on fishing gear (600 hits). Both highlighted research published in ESA’s newest journal, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
  
  
• A recent sampling of ESA “in the news” includes:

The GE Information Bulletin, Scoop.co.nz (press release), New Zealand. 7 June 2004.
.”.. Meanwhile the Ecological Society of America’s thorough scientific review of environmental concerns across the whole range of GE organisms should be a useful ...”

Chambersburg Public Opinion, Pennsylvania. 18 June 2004
.”.. By 2020 the vast majority of dams in the US will have outlived their design life, according to a 2003 paper for the Ecological Society of America...”

News24, South Africa. 2 June 2004
“The Ecological Society of America (ESA) says in its action plan for the next century that the only way to ensure a sustainable co-existence between humans and ...”

TidePool. 11 June 2004
.”.. such snowpack as did accumulate would melt earlier in the spring, says a 1999 study from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America ...”

Outreach

• PAO produced the Society’s seventh Annual Report, distributed to the membership in January. The report covers all aspects of the Society, including finances; the Public Affairs, Program, and Publications Offices; and Chapters and Sections. In addition to providing an overview of Society activities for ESA members, the report is useful for meetings with potential funding sources and with others who are interested in the Society.
  
  
• ESA held a Congressional briefing this year highlighting the Society’s scientific position paper on genetically engineered organisms. Allison Snow, lead author of the ESA paper, briefed members of the Senate Agriculture Committee staff on the environmental potential of GEOs. In addition, ESA joined the American Fisheries Society and the Estuarine Research Federation in hosting a congressional briefing on essential fish habitat. Past President Ann Bartuska spoke on behalf of the Society at the briefing, which drew an audience of 50.
  

JSTOR

Maggie Smith, JSTOR Project Manager (in addition to her responsibilities as Policy Analyst), continued her work in assembling the second phase of the JSTOR biology/ecology cluster. Among those journals accepting ESA’s invitation to join JSTOR were BioScience, the Journal of Mammology, the Biological Bulletin, Condor, Herpetologica, and Biogeochemistry.

Staff
The Public Affairs Office is staffed by: Nadine Lymn, Director of Public Affairs; Annie Drinkard, Public Affairs Officer; and Maggie Smith, JSTOR Project Manager/Policy Analyst.

Back to Table of Contents

EDUCATION OFFICE

This year has been a busy one for ESA Education Office staff. The Education Office develops and manages programs that aim to increase the diversity of ecology-related professions and improve the quality of ecology education at all levels. In 2003/2004 we continued to expand on our main education projects including EcoEdNet (Ecology Education Network), part of the Bioscience Education Network (BEN), and SEEDS (Strategies for Ecology Education Development and Sustainability), as well as remaining active in education and policy activities occurring both nationally and in the D.C. area. The Education office staff also engages in many outreach activities such as dissemination of education materials through our web site and mail.

Strategies for Ecology Education and Sustainability (SEEDS)

Funding: In June 2004, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Board of Trustees approved a 2-year Strategies for Ecology Education, Development and Sustainability (SEEDS) proposal. Along with continuing current SEEDS activities, the purpose of this grant will be to reach out to Latino students; develop a growing presence of SEEDS programs on campuses; build on partnerships with field stations, research institutes, and Long Term Ecological Research sites (LTER network) for hosting SEEDS fellows; and strengthen faculty professional development activities. SEEDS staff also prepared a proposal to the Department of Education, which if funded, will allow SEEDS to offer regional meetings to students and faculty.

Advisory Board: The SEEDS advisory board met at the 2003 ESA Annual Meeting and in February 2004. The Board provided key insight and support in crafting the latest SEEDS proposal.

SEEDS Chapters: Campus Ecology Chapters have been instrumental in expanding the program to serve a greater number and diversity of students. Over the course of three semesters, a total of 438 students participated in one of the 18 Campus Ecology Chapters across the country at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Tribal Colleges. These chapters receive small funds to promote ecology opportunities for minority students by engaging in education, outreach, recruitment, and career development. ESA staff visited 11 of these chapters in 2003 and early 2004. In addition to Chapter funds, each chapter can apply for special project funds to ensure that creative ideas to further promote ecology can be supported by the program. In the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004, 12 projects were funded. Projects included a workshop for K-12 teachers, GIS/GPS training for faculty, and a community nature park.

Field Trips: Two field trips were held in 2003/2004. The primary goals of field trips are to further students’ knowledge about the field of ecology; provide students with an overview of several interesting and ecologically important sites; enable students to build a network among professionals in the field of ecology and with a group of other students sharing the same interests; expose students to the practical application of ecology; and to build student awareness of various ecological internships, degrees, and career options.

In November 2003 SEEDS supported a student field trip to Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C., highlighting the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network and other local sites including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Headquarters, and the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Attendees included 25 students from 17 schools and three SEEDS faculty. The first day of the field trip was spent in Washington, D.C., where students learned about graduate school opportunities and environmental justice at the EPA Headquarters. The second half of the day was spent at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History where a career luncheon panel was held, followed by a behind-the-scenes tour of the Museum. The day concluded with dinner and music at the Jazz Café in the Museum. The second day of the field trip was spent at various sites of the BES, ending with free time in Inner Harbor, Baltimore. On Sunday, the final day, the morning was spent at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

SEEDS sponsored a student field trip to the University of Calgary Kananaskis Field Stations in early June for 20 students and two faculty. ESA members Ed Johnson and Karen Yee of the University of Calgary organized the field trip itinerary and presenters. The first full day of the field trip was spent in Calgary where students learned about Calgary’s water, and the conservation biology program and animal health at the Calgary Zoo. The remainder of the field trip was spent at the Kananaskis Field Stations, meeting with a variety of researchers in the area. The final day of the field trip was spent at Kootenay National Park and the Athabasca Glacier and concluded with dinner and sightseeing in the town of Banff.

ESA Annual Meeting: The cornerstone of the SEEDS program continues to be the ESA Annual Meeting. An ESA member selection committee identified 30 students and 20 faculty to receive travel awards to attend the 2004 ESA Annual Meeting. Each student will be paired with a meeting mentor, an ESA member with expertise in their interest area, to help guide them through the meeting. Mentors include six SEEDS alumni who are now in graduate school. Events at the meeting for participants will include orientation sessions, a breakfast for students and mentors, and a participants’ workshop.

Fellowships: SEEDS Undergraduate Research Fellowships provide a year-long authentic research experience to students in ecology and engage ESA members from research institutions in the SEEDS program. The first three SEEDS Student Undergraduate Fellowships were awarded in the spring of 2003, and these students will be presenting their research findings at the 2004 ESA meeting in Portland, Oregon. In January a professional development workshop was held for the fellows and their mentors with topics including data collection and ethics, and analyzing and interpreting results. The 2004 cohort includes six students from across the country who were selected from among 23 applicants.

Women and Minorities in Ecology (WAMIE) Committee

In February of 2004, just over 10 years after the original WAMIE report was released, a new committee (a subcommittee of the Education and Human Resources Committee) was formed and met, along with ESA staff, to discuss which of the action items from the original report have been implemented, and summarize those that show progress towards ESA’s goal of involving a broader population in ecological science. Members of the WAMIE committee convened again from 18 to 20 May to write a second report with specific information related to the progress of each of the recommendations made in the WAMIE I report. While this second document is still being drafted, a status report of the committee’s progress has been written and will be presented to the ESA Governing Board in August.

Bioscience Education Network (BEN)

ESA is a sub-awardee of the Bioscience Education Network, a collaborative funded by the National Science Foundation and administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Taylor took the lead in helping shape the overarching BEN Project and also developed ESA’s portal, Ecoed. In 2004, Taylor represented ESA and the BEN project at the National Science Digital Library Conference. Since September 2003, over 140 new education resources were catalogued and validated through the ecoed.net library. These include new issues and experiments from Volume 1 of the peer-reviewed Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, as well as digital images and curriculum. Taylor met with the BEN coordinating council and participated in various conference calls related to metadata sharing and new partners.

ESA submitted a proposal to NSF with the Bioscience Education Network for continued funding of the ecoed.net library.

Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE)

Taylor has continued to work with the TIEE principal investigators Bruce Grant and Charlene D’Avanzo and managing editor Susan Musante to develop this project. A workshop was held at the 2003 ESA meeting and an authors’ workshop will be held at the 2004 meeting.

Volume 1 of Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) was officially published and over 400 CDs have been produced to date. TIEE is also available free at ‹tiee.ecoed.net›. Volume 2 will be published and accessible on the web by August 2004. Taylor and intern Dara Zycherman co-authored an issue for TIEE on the ecological implications of plant biotechnology.

Outreach and meetings

Education staff and SEEDS students attended a number of scientific and minority-focused meetings: American Indian Science and Engineering Society (Armstrong, Hoffman, and SEEDS Alumni James Costello exhibited and presented a session on careers in ecology); Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (Armstrong and SEEDS student Sophi Beym exhibited); Minorities in Natural Science and Related Sciences (Hoffman and SEEDS student Laura Washington exhibited); American Society of Microbiology Undergraduate Education Conference (Hoffman attended); American Geophysical Union Increasing Diversity in the Earth and Space Sciences Forum (Hoffman and Taylor attended and presented a poster). In addition, Taylor represented ESA at the 2003 North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE) meeting and presented at the 2004 Council of Undergraduate Education meeting.

Education Office Staff:
Jason Taylor, Director of Education; Katherine Hoffman, Education Coordinator; Melissa Jurgenson-Armstrong, SEEDS Regional Coordinator; Interns

Back to Table of Contents

PUBLICATIONS OFFICE

A. Submissions and production (see Table 1 for summary)

Calendar year 2003 brought another marked increase in submissions to ESA journals relative to the previous year. Between 1 January 2003 and 31 December 2003, the Publications Office logged in 1,621 manuscripts, an 8.1% increase compared to 2002, and a new all-time record. Of the manuscripts received last year, 1,189 were submitted to Ecology/Ecological Monographs (a 9.9% increase relative to the previous year), and 432 were submitted to Ecological Applications (a 3.3% increase). The data for submissions since 1987 are presented graphically in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Number of manuscripts submitted to ESA journals, 1987–2003.

Based on the numbers through 30 June 2004 (968 total), submissions in the present year are up an incredible 19.4% over 2003! Submissions to Ecological Applications account for the lion’s share of this increase (295 submissions in 2004, as of 30 June). If the trend continues through the year, Ecological Applications will receive 36.6% more submissions in 2004 than in 2003.

The acceptance rates (percentage of decisions made during 2003) were 24.5% for Ecology/Ecological Monographs and 38.6% for Ecological Applications (see Fig. 2). ESA’s journals are among the most selective journals publishing papers related to ecology.





Fig. 2. Acceptance rates for manuscripts submitted to ESA journals, 1987–2003.

The continuing decline in the average length of Ecology articles (see Fig. 3) reflects the ongoing effort to encourage authors to submit more concise papers for publication and to utilize Ecological Archives.

Fig. 3. Average article length, 1987–2003.


The three print journals published 6,160 pages in 2003, including a 228-page supplement to Ecological Applications (“Marine Reserves”), 1.7% more than in 2001 (see Fig. 4). The page budget was increased in 1999 in a concerted effort to decrease the backlog of papers awaiting publication (thereby decreasing the time between acceptance and publication). The manuscript histories published as footnotes for each published paper indicate that papers are now appearing in an increasingly timely manner.
Fig. 4. Total number of pages published in ESA journals, 1987–2003.

During 2003 (its first year as an entirely online publication), the Bulletin published 212 pages, 22.7% fewer than in 2002. Our ability to include color images has added to the visual appeal of the Bulletin.
Overall, the journals remain healthy. The large volume of submissions, the high circulations, and the consistently high impact factors for ESA journal articles (according to the ISI Science Citation Reports) reflect the esteem with which the profession views ESA publications.

B. Time to publication

We have made dramatic progress over the past few years in decreasing the time to publication. The backlog of accepted papers awaiting publication is essentially a thing of the past, thanks primarily to the increased page budget adopted several years ago. There have also been payoffs resulting from the efforts to encourage authors to submit more concise papers as Reports (Ecology) and Communications (Ecological Applications), as well as the increasing use of Ecological Archives for digital publication of information not integral to accepted papers. Shorter papers can be reviewed, revised, and copyedited more quickly than the standard articles of the past. In addition, we can publish more of them in a given issue, while still keeping within the page budget. We are starting to see papers published in as short a time as 5–6 months following submission.

C. Ecological Archives

We have continued to promote the publication of appendices and supplemental materials in ESA’s Electronic Data Archive, Ecological Archives. During 2003, 120 of the papers published in ESA journals had one or more digital appendices and/or supplements published in Ecological Archives (and linked to the online versions of the published papers). Data Archive Manager Jane Bain has done a superb job of keeping up with the accelerated pace of files to be posted. The default is that all appendices and supplementary material referred to as being “available” in published papers are posted in digital form in Ecological Archives and are not printed. ESA is one of the leaders in the biological sciences in the use of digital archiving in conjunction with its publications.

D. Accomplishments

1) Online submission and peer review

We successfully implemented a new totally web-based system for manuscript submission and peer review on 1 January 2004. The entire staff, and Publications Coordinator Anne Marie Whelan in particular, worked very hard to bring us to this momentous point of departure. Authors no longer need to send hard copies or e-mail attachments to the Publications Office or the Editor-in-Chief in order to have their work considered for publication. Manuscripts may now be sent to the journal over the Internet in the original digital format (e.g., Word, WordPerfect, or LaTex), and there are several format options for figures, including JPEG, TIFF, and Excel. The new system converts the files into a merged PDF for editors and reviewers.
Peer review is now conducted via the same integrated system, with password-protected confidentiality for reviewers. Our hope is that the entire submission and review process will be expedited. There have already been significant savings in terms of postage and paper costs, both for ESA and for authors.
Another benefit of the new system is that corresponding authors may check the status of their manuscripts online at any time. Authors and reviewers may also use the system to update their addresses and contact information.

2) New covers

The July 2003 issue of Ecology was the inaugural issue with the new full-color cover design. We are very happy with the results, and we hope our readers were pleasantly surprised. We tried to make the new cover design look new yet familiar. Many stylistic elements of the old covers have been preserved, including the distinguishing colors of ESA’s three long-standing journals. We have also kept the Table of Contents on the back cover of the print journals for the convenience of our readers. Finally, the covers of Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Ecological Applications, and the now exclusively digital Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America now bear a familial resemblance to Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

3) New Firewall

We installed a new CheckPoint firewall appliance, which will provide greater security for our web server, while allowing access for programmers at the Allen Press to make requested changes to the online submission and review system.

4) New equipment

During the first half of 2004, the Publications Office upgraded three computer workstations and also purchased a color printer and a new scanner. The workstation upgrades resulted in the retirement of our last Windows 95 machine. The purchase of the color printer is related to needs related to our color covers (no more trips to Kinko’s for color-match prints!). The new scanner should allow us to modify some author figures in-house. Our hope is that we will be able to reduce the need for authors to redo submitted figures prior to publication.

We also purchased a new tape drive for backing up the Publications Office web server, which hosts the online submission/peer-review system, as well as Ecological Archives and the Publications web page. Our nightly backups can now be accomplished in less than half the time previously required, and we are in no danger of exceeding the tapes’ capacity for at least another year. Of course the need for the new tape drive was a result of the rapid growth in data now on the web server (submitted manuscripts and reviews, correspondence, etc.).

E. Goals

We expect several exciting developments during the coming year:

1) Beginning with the papers scheduled for publication in 2005, we will cease to send hard-copy proofs to authors. Rather, authors will be notified via e-mail that proofs are available on a password-protected ftp site. For now, authors will either create their own pdf’s of corrected proofs and e-mail them to us, or else send us the marked-up proofs as hard copy (the old-fashioned way). We will be working with Allen Press to develop a set of allowable tools for correcting proofs digitally, but that won’t happen right away. The immediate advantage to ESA of implementing pdf proofs is that we can eliminate a sizable postage expense this fall. An immediate advantage to authors (especially foreign ones) is that they will receive their proofs much more quickly. Finally, the Allen Press will post an E-book pdf of the final version of the article on the same password-protected site once the issue is in final form. Authors will be able to use these as “digital reprints.” There will be no cost to authors, nor will there be any additional cost to ESA for making these final pdf files available to authors.

2) We will begin beta testing new “pre-editing” software that will automate some of the repetitive aspects of the copy editor’s job, including, e.g., checking references against the text, converting British spellings, etc. Since we have agreed to serve as beta-testers, we will not incur any additional expense. (Allen Press intends to charge other customers for this feature.) We hope to start testing the system shortly after the Annual Meeting.

3) We will phase in new procedures whereby we will transmit copy-edited manuscripts to the printer digitally, via ftp, for coding and composition. There is much work to be done related to handling figures, tables, and math (especially in LaTex files), so this won’t happen right away.

4) We will also phase in the transfer of responsibility for making alterations to figures to the Publications Office. The Allen Press has offered to purchase a complete graphics work station for our office and to pay for travel to their facilities to train two Publications Office staff members. This will mean that we will finally be able to use author-provided digital graphics files, and to cut back on the number of requests to authors for revised figures at the copyediting stage. We hope to start before the end of 2004.

F. Concerns

If the recent increase in the rate of submissions to Ecological Applications continues, we may need to increase the page budget and possibly increase the issue frequency of that journal.

G. Publications office staff

Publications Office: Jane Bain (Data Archive Manager and Features Editor), Gail Blake (Copy Editor), David Gooding (Associate Managing Editor), Dooley Kiefer (Copy Editor), Rachel Lodder (Copy Editor), Regina Przygocki (Graphics/Production Coordinator) , Jane Shaw (Office Manager), Margaret Shepard (Technical Editor), Nancy Sorrells (Copy Editor), Heather Somerville (Office Assistant), Linda Stoddard (Editorial Assistant), and Anne Marie Whelan (Publications Coordinator). We are also indebted to our freelance copy editors (Ellen Cotter, Jennifer Dotson, and Nancy Istock) for their fine work and adherence to deadlines.

Publications staff

Production Editor Jill Leichter moved to New Zealand last fall. We miss her and wish her all the best in her new home. ESA greatly benefited from Jill’s talents and dedication over the last several years.
Our newest employee, Regina Przygocki, brings us a new level of expertise in the realm of computer graphics and online publications. Regina most recently worked as Director of Publication for Voyagers Travel (an eco-tourism company that organizes trips for many university alumni organizations). Regina started work full-time on 3 November. She has already made her mark, and we are expecting her to play a crucial role as we continue our move toward a digital world in the Publications Office.

Table 1. Summary statistics for ESA publications.
Back to Table of Contents

MEETINGS

The continuity and consistency of those staff undertaking ESA meeting functions, combined with greater coordination and efficiency with other HQ staff using a “team” approach to planning, enables our Society to execute increasingly large and complex meetings skillfully, economically and innovatively. Our string of successful meetings is emulated by other organizations. During the past year, several nationwide publications for meeting professionals have given prominent coverage to aspects of ESA meetings, especially activities that promote energy conservation and greening, interface with local ecologists, and make imaginative use of natural and historic sites.

HQ meeting planning is coordinated closely and regularly with the work of ESA’s Meetings Committee, the Program Chair and Local Host Committee, the staff expertise of the local Convention and Visitors Bureau and Convention Center, as well as a number of individuals and organizations in the destination location. Due to this synergy of energy, knowledge and skill, ESA is able to accomplish a great deal, without the expense of outsourcing meeting functions to destination management or consulting firms.

This summer, the Society’s Meetings Manager is running her eighth Annual Meeting, and the Registrar her sixth Annual Meeting. Familiarity with the attendees’ preferences and patterns enables us to better plan, anticipate, and innovate. Being able to track registration and session statistics over a number of years allows ESA HQ to examine patterns and trends and better advise Program Chairs and Local Hosts.

In addition, with the benefit of the high degree of honest feedback from postmeeting evaluations, and continued improvements in technology, we are able institute changes and experiment with new ways to provide a quality meeting experience.

With every year and every meeting we run, we discover things that we can do to make the experience better for the attendees, the volunteer leadership, and the staff. The constant evolution of ESA’s meeting functions are a “work in progress.”

88th ESA Annual Meeting (held with ISEM-NA Chapter),Savannah, Georgia, 3–8 August 2003

ESA had not held an annual meeting in the southeast region in a very long time. The descriptive and evocative theme for this meeting “Uplands to Lowlands: Coastal Processes in a time of Global Change,” appeared to stimulate more than the usual number of themed symposium proposals, contributed papers, and posters. There was also a good turnout from the University of Georgia.

Overall, however, the registration for the Savannah meeting turned out to be less than the previous year. There are probably numerous reasons for the somewhat lower than average turnout.

Despite concerns that Savannah would be a less than ideal environment in which to hold an annual meeting, many of those who did attend expressed surprise at the charm of the location and 75% of respondents in the postmeeting evaluation felt that they would like to see the Society consider holding another meeting in Savannah.

The final number of accepted abstracts for posters, oral contributed, and organized sessions, and symposia: 1783

Number of sessions

Invasive Plants Conference, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 3–7 November 2003

The full title of this meeting was “Invasive Plants in Natural and Managed Systems: Linking Science and Management, and the Seventh International Conference on Ecology and Management of Alien Plant Invasions.” (IPINAMS-EMAPI7) The conference was co-organized by ESA and the Weed Science Society of America. Carla D’Antonio was the ESA Program Chair and Nelroy Jackson was the WSSA Program Chair. ESA Science staff member Lori Hidinger and WSSA Executive Director Rob Hedberg were the Conference Program Coordinators, and Ellen Cardwell was the Conference Manager. Conference financial sponsors included the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense Legacy Program, the National Park Service, Animal and Plant Inspection Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the Center for Invasive Plant Management.

The conference consisted of four plenaries, 13 symposia, 13 workshops, 6 round tables, over 300 posters, exhibits, 11 scientific field trips, and social functions. There was also a premeeting one and one-half day conference on Sunday and Monday morning organized by The Nature Conservancy. This conference was budgeted for 350 attendees but nearly 800 registrants participated.

ESA now has established a proven track record partnering with companion scientific organizations to hold these specialized meetings. Our science staff continues to investigate future opportunities for this type of collaboration.

89th ESA Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon, 2–6 August 2004

The Portland Meeting’s theme is “Lessons of Lewis and Clark: Ecological Exploration of Inhabited Landscapes.”

The selection of keynote speakers for the Public Plenary and the Opening Plenary as well as several of the symposia and evening sessions, and at least one Field Trip reflect this theme, and there has been a focused effort, as there was in Tucson, to incorporate First Nations and Traditional Ecological Knowledge aspects in this meeting.

This year also has provided a large concentration and involvement by Federal scientists and land managers, in part due to Past-President Bartuska, and the Co-Chairs of the local Host Committee, and in part because of the presence of field offices for Federal Agencies in Oregon and Washington. The Federal Land Management Plenary on Wednesday is a unique feature of this meeting.
This meeting has proved to generate the single largest preregistration in the Society’s history. Fortuitously, the size and configuration of the Oregon Convention Center has enabled ESA to schedule the entire scientific program under one roof—one of our long-standing goals.

The Annual Report of the Meetings Committee submitted by Tom Swetnam, Steve Chaplin, and Ellen Cardwell describes new programmatic aspects of the 2004 Portland meeting in detail. Several of these changes were instituted because of comments made in the postmeeting evaluation from the Savannah meeting.

This year, for the first time, ESA, working with the Portland Oregon Visitors Association (POVA) Housing Bureau, was able to use a real-time, electronic housing reservations system that included not only hotels but also dormitories.

By the 90th Annual Meeting in Montreal, ESA HQ will be using a real-time system for meeting registrations (including workshops, field trips, and ticketed events) as well.

90th ESA Annual Meeting, held jointly with INTECOL, Montreal, Canada, 7-12 August 2005

The theme for this meeting is “Ecology at Multiple Scales.”

The Program Chair for ESA for this meeting is Paul Ringold; for INTECOL it is Rebecca Sharitz. Dave Grow has been retained by ESA to serve as their assistant for the scientific program, having served in this capacity for the past two years for Tom Swetnam. This group holds a weekly conference call to coordinate planning for the scientific program.

Currently Calls for Symposium Proposals and Organized Oral Session Proposals are live and posted on the ESA and INTECOL web sites, and the Calls for Workshops and Supplementary Program Proposals (Evening Sessions, Discussions and Special Sessions) are posted and will be activated in mid-September.

The two Local Hosts are Catherine Potvin of McGill University and Christian Messier of University of Quebec, Montreal. They have created a 10-member local host committee to help organize field trips, plan local activities, and recruit student volunteers.

ESA HQ is contracting with Mendlesohn Ltd., a Canadian firm, to assist the Society and our Annual Meeting Exhibitors with customs and transborder shipments.

ESA themed meeting in Mexico in 2006

In order to build on the cooperative relationships established at the Ecologists of the Americas Meeting held in Savannah last summer, and in keeping with the Governing Board’s interest in holding a meeting in Mexico that could be attended by ecologists from Mexico and Central and South America, as well as the United States, ESA is working on the scientific and logistic plans to hold a 300–500 person meeting in Mexico in January 2006.

A possible theme that has been explored to date is: “Ecological impacts of globalization (or trade) in the Americas: challenges and opportunities for environmental scientists.” Program Chairs Jeff Herrick and Jose Sarukhan have been developing the format and content, and potential speakers for this meeting.

Prospective locations for the meeting include: Merida in the Yucatan, Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, and Oaxaca. Information has been obtained from each of these destinations concerning convention/meeting facilities, lodging costs and availability, travel costs, and field trip potential.

The Mexico meeting planning team will be meeting in Portland for further work.

91st ESA Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee, 6–11 August 2006

The program chair for this meeting is Kiyoko Miyanishi and the local host chair is Scott Franklin. No theme has been selected yet and no planning for the scientific program has commenced. Hotel contracts and arrangements with the Cook Convention Center are, however, well underway. The Cook Convention Center has recently undergone expansion adding several meeting rooms and a fine new concert hall seating 2700. Arrangements for dormitory lodging at the University of Memphis cannot be made until a year prior to the actual meeting dates.

92nd ESA Annual Meeting held jointly with the Society for Ecological Restoration, San Jose, California, 5–10 August 2007

Kerry Woods has agreed to serve as the Program Chair for this Annual Meeting, and the Governing Board has approved Rachel O’Malley of San Jose State as the Local Host Chair. Because of the strong interest in restoration at both San Jose State, and in the Santa Clara Water District, this seemed like an ideal meeting at which to again meet jointly with the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) as ESA did with SER in Tucson in 2002. Both Boards have approved holding this meeting jointly. Work has started on review and approval of hotel contracts and a contract with the McEnery Convention Center.

93rd ESA Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 3–8 August 2007

Lou Gross has agreed to serve as the Program Chair for this Annual Meeting, and Gretchen Meyer has agreed to serve as the Local Host Chair, pending Board approval. One of the extremely attractive features of Milwaukee as a meeting destination is that the Midwest Express Convention Center, the hotels and dorms, and the location for the proposed ESA Social in the wonderful Public Museum are all in a compact area and easily walkable distances. Lake Michigan, a network of running and cycling trails, and the new Milwaukee Art Museum make this a very appealing location for this meeting.

HQ Meetings Staff continue to make arrangements for all Board, Committee, and special meeting that occur throughout the year in the Washington DC area.

Meetings staff:
Ellen R. Cardwell, Meetings Manager
A. Patricia Crocker, Meetings Associate/Registrar

Back to Table of Contents
II. REPORTS OF OFFICERS

VICE PRESIDENT FOR EDUCATION AND HUMAN RESOURCES

Awards Committee

The ESA Awards subcommittees met virtually during the fall and winter to select a slate of awardees to be recognized at the 2004 Annual Meeting in Portland. Dr. Judith L. Bronstein and her committees did an outstanding job this year. The following individuals were recommended and approved for ESA awards:

Eminent Ecologist Award: Sam McNaughton
Distinguished Service Citation: Jim Reichman
Corporate Award: Taylor Guitars
Mercer Award: John Stachowicz and colleagues
Cooper Award: Jack Williams and colleagues
Odum Education Award: Richard Root
MacArthur Award: May Berenbaum
Sustainability Science Award: Marten Scheffer and colleagues

“Profiles of Ecologists” Project

Following in the tradition established in 2002, about 20 ecologists plus the 2004 award winners have been invited to contribute biographical sketches for the “Profiles of Ecologists” Project. The posters will be on display throughout the duration of the Annual Meeting. Each features the story of how an ecologist entered his/her career in ecology, and presents their views on communicating ecology to diverse audiences. The posters will be added to the “Profiles” link on the ESA web site at ‹http://www.esa.org/education/whatdoecologistsdo.htm› to inspire and motivate both current and future ecologists to excel in the field.

Education and Human Resources at the Annual Meeting

Education and Human Resources are well represented at the Annual Meeting in Portland in 2004. Four workshops, four discussions, three contributed paper sessions, and one poster session were scheduled featuring education and environmental justice topics.

Education Mosaic Mixer: The SEEDS (Strategies for Ecology Education, Development and Sustainability) program will have high visibility at the Portland meeting. The theme for the mixer at the Portland meeting is “SEEDS Highlights.” The SEEDS Program has celebrated many accomplishments since the program received renewed funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in July 2002. The goal of SEEDS is to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the ecology profession by promoting ecology opportunities for students and their faculty. Probably the most significant accomplishment is the number of student contacts SEEDS has made in the past two years. Over 700 students have become aware of SEEDS through a variety of means, including becoming a member of one of the 18 SEEDS Chapters at minority-serving institutions across the country, through meeting SEEDS staff at minority-serving conferences, or simply through word of mouth. The expansion of SEEDS has been successful. SEEDS is flourishing as the interest of talented students has continued to grow every year. This year, the academic excellence of the pools for SEEDS awards (Undergraduate Research Fellowship, student field trip, Annual Meeting travel) has been especially high.

Diversity Luncheon: Dr. Carlos Robles is the featured speaker at the Diversity Luncheon this year. The title of his presentation will be “Recognized and Unrecognized Merits of Diversity.” His talk will consider the challenges and opportunities of promoting diversity in science, as reflected in the developing identification of aspiring minority students. Dr. Robles is a community ecologist and has been a member of ESA for nearly 30 years. His experimental work with predator–prey dynamics on rocky shores of California and British Columbia was featured in recent issues of Ecology. He founded in 1998, and now directs, the Center for Environmental Analysis (CEA-CREST) at California State University at Los Angeles.

Education and Human Resources Committee Meeting: Representatives of the EHRC met in Washington, D.C., on 21–23 May 2004. This year, EHRC has led two important initiatives for the ESA. First, we have taken a retrospective look to document the progress of the ESA on issues related to recruitment and participation of groups who are underrepresented in the field of ecology. A subcommittee led by Dr. Sonia Ortega has looked at the recommendations that were made in the 1993 report on “Women and Minorities in Ecology,” and has gathered evidence on the ESA’s progress on their implementation. The results of the committee’s work will be available in fall 2004. Second, we are about to launch a survey to evaluate the “Status of Ecology in the Undergraduate Curriculum. The work of the UG Curriculum sub-committee has been led by Dr. Saran Twombly. Participants will be asked to complete the web-based survey beginning in August 2004. Results should be available by the end of the year. Finally, the committee has continued activities begun last year to develop leaders in ecological education within the membership of the ESA. Moreover, the EHRC continues to plan for new ways to involve members in education and diversity initiatives within the society.

Education Newsletter: In late spring, education leaders in the ESA completed the annual Education Newsletter. The newsletter features highlights of member-led programs such as TIEE (Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, led by Charlene D’Avanzo and Bruce Grant) and FIRST (Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching led by Jan Hodder and Diane Ebert-May), and news about on-going ESA education and human resources initiatives. The newsletter can be found online at ‹http://www.esa.org/education/resources_teachers/generalEdu/educationSection.php›

Back to Table of Contents

VICE PRESIDENT FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS

The Vice President for Public Affairs has three primary areas of oversight: the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), the International Relations Committee (IRC), and liaisons to related societies, such as AAAS, AIBS, AWCI, and NASULGC (National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges). The PAC works with the Public Affairs Office (PAO) to coordinate all aspects of communication with and outreach to the public. The PAC and PAO have worked to increase ESA’s visibility in Washington and outreach to other audiences during the year.

Public Affairs Committee

A primary role of the PAC is to provide assistance and guidance to the PAO in representing ecological science to various public entities, including legislators and their staffs, governmental and nongovernmental agencies, and news media. In addition, the PAC reviews and makes recommendations about ESA Position Papers to the Governing Board. This year the PAC also assisted the PAO in developing ESA’s Environmental Policy Priorities for FY 2004, which were subsequently approved by the Governing Board.

The PAC met during the Annual Meeting in Savannah in 2003. We also communicated by conference calls to provide interim progress reports and coordination of PAC projects. As part of Congressional Visits Day activities, PAC and PAO members visited several House and Senate staffers, as well as individual Congressional delegates, to urge support for increasing agency research budgets, particularly NSF, USDA, and USGS.

Our Public Plenary speaker in Portland is Dr. Patricia Limerick, Professor of History and Environmental Studies and Director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado. Consistent with the theme of the meeting, Patty will give a talk titled, “Naturalists, National Mission, and the Wonders of the West: The Lewis and Clark Expedition as a Parable.” To enhance communication between ecologists and policy makers, the PAC applied for and was awarded funds by ESA’s Long Range Planning program to bring key members of the Congressional staff as visitors to the 2004 ESA Annual Meeting, as we did for the first time in 2003. In 2003, we brought Susannah Foster, Staff Member of the House ScienceCommittee, to the Annual Meeting in Savannah. The program in Savannah was a resounding success, and Susannah expressed great satisfaction with the visit. She participated in a field trip, attended the Public Plenary and opening mixer, and met with a number of ESA members in individual meetings. As a Congressional Science Committee staffer, we believe that Susannah has the potential to serve as a very useful contact for issues that are important to ESA members.
At the 2004 Annual Meeting in Portland, the PAC and PAO will be hosting one or two congressional staffers who are in a position to influence science funding policy and/or environmental policy.

Position papers: Several ESA position papers are currently in progress. The position paper on GMOs with Allison Snow as lead author was approved during the year and is now submitted for publication in Ecological Applications. Jon Keeley is chairing a committee to develop a paper on fire management and policy. In addition, with PAC’s assistance and review, the PAO issued an ESA Position Statement on Scientific Peer Review.

International Relations Committee

A primary role of the IRC is to consider ways in which we can encourage foreign ecologists to participate in ESA. The IRC evaluates and makes recommendations to the Board for reduced fees for international library subscriptions and international memberships.

Public Affairs Committee members are: Alison Power (Chair), Ed Johnson, and Christy Johnson; ex officio James LaBaugh, Chair, Metro D.C. Chapter

Back to Table of Contents

VICE PRESIDENT FOR SCIENCE

In view of the new directions anticipated from the Visions Report, the Research Committee and, to some extent, SBI had a limited range of activities this year. Principal activities were the Summer Institute on Statistical Computation, planned through Research Committee discussions during the previous two years, Congressional Testimony by the VP for Science on the NSF budget, and a draft statement on the federal peer review process.

Summer School on Ecological Inference and Forecasting. Organizers: James S. Clark, Alan Gelfand, Carol A. Brewer, and Barbara V. Braatz

The NSF-funded summer institute attracted over 100 graduate student and postdoc applications for 24 slots. The institute was designed to address the challenges of complex and obscure processes in ecology. Ecological inference and forecasting are limited by large and diverse sources of variability that operate at a range of scales. Hierarchical Bayes and Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation provide powerful tools for analyzing processes characterized by multiple sources of uncertainty and variability.

The Institute took place at Duke University in June of this year. The 2-week, graduate/post-graduate level “summer school” introduced ecologists and earth scientists to modern statistical computation techniques. Leading statisticians and ecologists provided day-long presentations and hands-on training with computation techniques. Students organized in working groups, completed a hierarchical Bayes analysis on their own data, and are preparing reports. Lecture notes will be published as a book together with approximately four student group chapters. Instructors were drawn from the environmental statistics community with expertise in hierarchical Bayes, including Brad Carlin, Jim Clark, Montse Fuentes, Alan Gelfand, Kent Holsinger, Doug Nychka, and Chris Wikle. VP for Education Carol Brewer conducted assessment activities and is preparing a report.

Position Statement on Scientific Peer Review

The Position Statement on Scientific Peer Review was prepared by the ESA, led by Maggie Smith and including Tom Sisk (NAU), Dave Wilcove (Princeton), and VP for Science Jim Clark. In light of pending changes in peer review of documents by the federal government, the ESA felt the need to provide input on the role of peer review and to comment on aspects of the scientific peer review process. The position statement can be found on the ESA web site under Public Affairs.

Congressional testimony in support of the NSF Budget

The VP for Science presented to the Subcommittee on VA and HUD the following testimony prepared by the ESA in support of the NSF Budget:

Subcommittee on VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies Appropriations

“Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am Jim Clark, Vice President for Science for the Ecological Society of America. ESA has been the nation’s premier professional society of ecological scientists for nearly 90 years, with a current membership of 8,000. I appreciate the opportunity to testify today on behalf of the National Science Foundation.

I would first like to thank the committee for its strong commitment to the NSF over the last several years. Investment in this agency is very much in the public interest and your vision will pay extraordinary dividends in the years to come. I am also grateful to the 107th Congress for passing the NSF Authorization Act, which laid out a plan to boost the nation’s investment in this agency.

We believe that NSF’s fiscal health is critical to maintaining the nation’s international scientific leadership. Dividends from past investments in the NSF are manifested in the individual scientific disciplines, as well as in the groundwork that has been laid for interdisciplinary research needed to meet present and future scientific challenges. Research supported through the NSF has led not only to major advancements in all of the sciences, mathematics, and engineering, but has repeatedly underpinned new technologies such as the use of bar codes for inventory control and bioengineering microbes to clean up toxic waste, as well as new techniques, for example improving a building’s resistance to damage during an earthquake.

Important accomplishments have resulted through NSF-funded research and the potential for future opportunities is immense. Biological research will improve our ability to assess and predict the status of ecosystems, which provide the United States with goods such as fish, and services, such as water purification. Research efforts in the social sciences will enhance our understanding of large-scale transformations such as globalization and democratization, while work in the ocean sciences holds the potential to reveal previously unimaginable images of even the deepest oceans. Advances in NSF-supported chemistry may lead to cleaner industrial technology and address problems of carbon sequestration. Research in the mathematical sciences has led to advances in cryptography and improved internet security.

In a time where we find more and more federally funded research directed by a particular agency mission, I want to highlight that one of NSF’s greatest strengths is its support of the best research, regardless of its potential use. The NSF peer review system has an excellent track record of choosing the best science and the best investigators to perform the research, as the significant number of Nobel Prize winners who received support from NSF demonstrates.

I wish to particularly thank the committee for its past support in recognizing that NSF is responsible for the majority of all nonmedical biological research, ranging from the molecular level to the study of entire ecosystems. Approximately 65 percent of all academic, nonmedical, biological research is supported through the National Science Foundation.

As a Professor of Biology and Director of Graduate Studies for Duke University’s Program in Ecology I have first-hand knowledge of the positive impact NSF has on a scientific discipline. Our own NSF-funded research on the Central Plains has shown us that historic experience, including the 1930’s Dust Bowl, is unremarkable in light of climate swings of the last few centuries. We’ve learned many species cannot migrate fast enough to track a shifting 21st Century climate and will be left behind, with large consequences for biodiversity. This has significant implications for agriculture in the Great Plains region.

Continued advancement in ecological science depends upon healthy NSF budgets. Many ecologists whose grant proposals are deemed of very high quality are either not funded or go under-funded due to inadequate NSF grant funds. Eventually this funding situation is likely to affect the choices of U.S. students as to whether or not they choose to enter the field of ecology, a science that is crucial to meeting emerging environmental challenges ranging from the ecology of disease to the likely consequences of human alteration of the nitrogen cycle.

Other science, mathematics, and engineering fields experience many of the same tensions exhibited in the ecological sciences. These disciplines share our concern that not enough U.S. students are interested in science- and engineering-related careers. Many of us in the scientific community are worried that the U.S. may lose its preeminent position in science. All science, math, and engineering disciplines depend upon a strong National Science Foundation.

As the only federal agency to support science and education across all disciplines, and as the principal supporter of environmental biology, NSF’s contributions have been extremely valuable to the U.S. research enterprise. We hope that the committee will do its best to ensure that the agency continues on this path. Again, Mr. Chairman, thank you for your leadership and your and the committee’s concern for the National Science Foundation.”

Research committee members:
James S. Clark (chair), Lisa Curran, Nancy Grimm, Mark Hay, Anne Kinzig, Mathew Leibold, Mary Power, Phil Robertson, Alan Townsend

Back to Table of Contents

III. REPORTS OF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

THE BULLETIN OF THE ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

In this first online volume, four issues of the Bulletin were published in 2003 as Volume 84, Numbers 1–4, which totaled 212 pages. This compares with 274 pages in Volume 83 (2002), and 250 pages in Volume 82 (2001). Of the 207 pages in Volume 84 exclusive of advertisements, creative contributions accounted for 76 pages (vs. 114 pages in 2002), or 37% of the volume. These include Commentaries (39 pages), Meeting Reviews (8 pages), Technological Tools (22 pages), and Focus on Field Stations (7 pages). The remaining 131 pages, or 63% of the volume, represent news and archival material. They were divided among Notices and Announcements (37 pages), Society Actions (38 pages), Chapter and Section News (7 pages), Meeting Calendar (15 pages), and Annual Reports to Council (34 pages, vs. 70 pages in Volume 83).

The difference in pages published in 2003 (212) from 2002 (274) is primarily attributable to steep declines in Commentaries (–38 pages) and in Annual Reports to Council (–36 pages). The latter is not surprising as it included reports to two separate Annual Meetings in 2002, and only one Annual Meeting in 2003. I suspect the decline in Commentary contributions reflects a smaller readership due to the reduced prominence of the Bulletin as an online publication, compared to its previous delivery to each member as a hard copy.

The 2003 volume marked the beginning of online publication of the Bulletin. At this point, the potential for success of the transition from the hard copy print medium is unknown, but we can be optimistic if the first two years of pages published are an indicator. The first three issues of 2004 are now “in print” and include 141 pages, while the same issues in 2003 included 139 pages. The issues began with the cover and individual sections available in pdf format, but during this second year of online publication, a pdf of the whole issue has been added, as have individual pages in html format. These changes should permit the Bulletin readers to fit its content more easily to their needs. However, I must admit that we know very little about readers of the Bulletin. Perhaps a start in gauging the value to readers of the Bulletin and its components would be to install hit counters on the Bulletin web pages for each issue, and for separate sections of each issue.

The continuing quality and readability of the Bulletin is, as usual, attributable essentially to the ESA Journal Production Office in Ithaca. Associate Editor David Gooding is invaluable at finding both glaring and subtle errors that I have missed in English usage and more frequently, in substance. Regina Przygocki has proven to be both skillful and meticulous in assembling the Bulletin after she stepped into the Production Editor shoes vacated after 2003 by the equally able Margaret Shepard.

In addition to the production staff, editors and interested contributors continue to provide diverse, well-written, and interesting manuscripts. I repeat here that David Inouye is responsible for Technological Tools, where many readers first turn upon arrival of the latest Bulletin edition. Harold Ornes has edited the highly regarded column Ecology 101 and we look forward to additional stimulating manuscripts from both of them. I thank them for their long service, and thank all those who contributed to the Bulletin in the years 2003 and 2004. I note with deep sincerity my great pleasure and satisfaction over the past 12 years in acting as facilitator (a.k.a. Editor-in-Chief) for both the thoughtful contributors and the production staff who work so hard and so well to publish the contributions. It has been a grand experience for which I thank you all.

Allen M. Solomon, Editor-in-Chief
Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America

Back to Table of Contents

ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

Ecological Applications is healthy and increasingly popular as an outlet for research on the interface of ecology and its applications. The journal’s citation rankings remain high and submissions are significantly up as reported by the Managing Editor. In fact, submissions are up so much that the board will be expanded by 5–6 members in order to control editorial workloads. During 2003–2004 several editors in key areas handled upwards of 25 papers, with a target of 10-12 papers per editor per year. While submissions remain high in traditional areas for the journal, such as landscape management, avian ecology (which remains at ~20% of total submissions), biogeochemistry and conservation biology, submissions in aquatic and marine ecology, disease ecology, and innovative quantitative methodology are increasing rapidly. The increase in submissions in marine ecology followed the landmark Marine Reserves special issue.

The number of proposals for special issues, invited features, and forums is increasing after a lull. The board has accepted a number of proposals and has several exciting features in progress. The Special Issue for the Large-Scale Biosphere Experiment in the Amazon is in final stages and contains a number of superb papers, and brings a strong group of young Brazilian scientists to the journal. [This Special Issue appeared as a Supplement to Ecological Applications Vol. 14, No. 4, August 2004. —Ed.] A group of papers on the “New Statistics in Ecology” represents a landmark synthesis of statistical thinking and techniques to address the emerging universe of ecological questions that for time or space scale reasons are not readily addressed using traditional manipulative experiments, or where estimation of parameters is more central than hypothesis testing per se. The issue was a collaboration between the statistical editors of Ecology and Applications, and will be a seminal reference for our field on both the basic and applied sides. Other features and forums address a range of issues ranging from reviews of methods and approaches to in-depth regional assessments.

Submissions to the journal are up significantly but, if anything, so is overall quality. As a result, in addition to the Managing Editor’s contingency planning for increasing the size of the journal, the board has been giving considerable thought to the mission of the journal and tightening standards for appropriateness. While each Associate Editor has slightly different standards for their specialty, we agree that (1) papers with a site or regional focus must have some larger message, (2) papers must be written to a fairly broad audience, including the potential users of the information, and not narrowly to a small colleague group, and (3) the link to the application of the knowledge must be a real and tangible aspect of the paper and not a distant hope. Based on discussions of criterion 2, above, I will be developing the 2005 editorial message to encourage authors to consider the audience of stakeholders and managers who might be able to take advantage of the work reported, and to include “hooks” to this community in, especially, the introductions and abstracts of paper. Of course, we continue to work with the D.C. office and Frontiers when we identify a paper of particular significance in this area, but in my view it is even more important that users of ecological information regard the average Ecological Applications issue as both a scholarly journal and a reference handbook on new approaches. Needless to say, given the writing habits of most of us, and the challenge of compromising between the requirements of scholarship and usability, this is an uphill battle, but we are making progress. Anecdotally, I have written to a number of authors rejecting papers without review on the grounds of inappropriateness for the journal and have received passionate and eloquent letters defending the work. These letters frequently make exactly the case required and form the basis for the introductions to successful submissions.

David Schimel, Editor-in-Chief

Back to Table of Contents
IV. REPORTS OF STANDING COMMITTEES

AWARDS COMMITTEE

The Awards Committee consists of the Chairs of nine active subcommittees. Each subcommittee is responsible for making recommendations for its own award(s). The compositions of the subcommittees and the recipients of the respective awards for 2003–2004 were:

Student Awards (Murray F. Buell and E. Lucy Braun Awards) Subcommittee

Christopher Sacchi (Chair), J. Alan Yeakley, Paul Marino, and Anita Davelos.

Recipients in 2003: Buell (best student presentation): James Vonesh, University of Florida.
Braun (best student poster): Sean Michaletz, University of Calgary.

Cooper Award Subcommittee

Stephen T. Jackson (Chair), Laura Hyatt, Sara Hotchkiss, Miles Silman, Scott Collins, and David Peterson. Judith Bronstein (Chair, ESA Awards Committee) acted as chair of the committee for the deliberations, due to a perceived conflict of interest between Jackson and one of this year’s award winners.

Recipients: Drs. John W. Williams, Bryan N. Shuman, and Thompson Webb III for their 2001 paper, “Dissimilarity analyses of Late-Quaternary vegetation and climate in eastern North America,” published in Ecology 82:3346-3362.

Corporate Award Subcommittee

Kate Lajtha (Chair), Gregory Aplet, Joan Ehrenfeld, Laura Foster Huenneke, and Scott Stoleson.

Recipient: The Taylor Guitar Company.

Eminent Ecologist Award and Distinguished Service Citation Subcommittee

Katherine L. Gross (Chair), Robert Holt, Nelson Hairston, Jr., Beatrice VanHorne, Paul Dayton, and Peter Groffman.

Recipients: Eminent Ecologist: Sam McNaughton, Syracuse University. Distingushed Service Citation: O.J. (Jim) Reichman, NCEAS.

Honorary Member Award Subcommittee

Sandra Tartowski (Chair), Edith Allen, Denise Dearing, Richard Ostfeld, Michael Auerbach, and Denise Breitberg.

Recipient: No award made in 2004.

MacArthur Award Subcommittee

Robert K. Colwell (Chair), Carla D’Antonio, Judy Meyer, Ann Kinzig, James Reichman, William Murdoch, and Steve Carpenter

Recipient: May Berenbaum, University of Illinois.

Mercer Award Subcommittee

Steve Heard (Chair), Sally Holbrook, James Morris, Jean Richardson, Andy Sih, Ellen Simms, and Mike Willig.

Recipients: John J. Stachowicz, Heather Fried, Richard W. Osman, and Robert B. Whitlatch, for their article, “Biodiversity, invasion resistance, and marine ecosystem function: reconciling pattern and process,” published in Ecology 83:2575–2590.

Odum Education Award Subcommitee

Linda Wallace (Chair), Charlene D’Avanzo, Margaret Carreiro, Bruce Grant, Peter Feinsinger, and Kathy Winnett-Murray.

Recipient: Richard B. Root, Cornell University

Sustainability Science Award Subcommitee

Terry Chapin (Chair), Kathryn Cottingham, Erika Zavaleta, Garry Peterson, Gary Kofinas, and Roz Naylor.

Recipients: Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan Foley, Carl Folke, and Brian Walker for their 2001 paper, “Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems.” Nature 413:591–596.

Judith L. Bronstein
ESA Awards Chair

Back to Table of Contents

BOARD OF PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION

The Board of Professional Certification (BPC) feels that it is very important to become a more visible part of the Society and the scientific community in order to increase the awareness and membership of ESA’s Professional Certification Program. Earlier this year we requested and received an amendment to our current annual travel budget of $5600, and an approval for an additional $3050 to support several of our program activities.

Our Evening Session held at last year’s Annual Meeting, “Certification and the Workplace,” was very successful and sparked quite a bit of interest in the Certification Program. This year’s evening session at the Portland meeting focuses on “Ethics and Ecologists,” and promises to be a lively evening, with three panelists including Paul Ehrlich.

The BPC should have available funds for annual travel for the BPC Review Meetings and for other modest program activities. The BPC plans to hold an Evening Session during each Annual Meeting and hopes to have the funds available to invite one or more guest speakers, covering their hotel costs for one night and their one-day registration to the meeting.

The BPC received a $1,000 Long-Term Planning Grant last fall for a portable booth as a display at a number of scientific meetings throughout 2004 and years to come. The BPC hopes that the visibility of a Certification booth at other scientific meetings will draw individuals with different ecological backgrounds, which in turn may invite ecologists with different disciplines to become members of ESA. We are grateful that we now have enough in our yearly budget to accommodate the expenses that exhibiting at meetings will require. We plan on purchasing the portable display after the Portland meeting.

The BPC completed its review of applications for certification and recertification in June. We have not received the final numbers yet, but those should be available by the time we meet in Portland.
The Board of Professional Certification and ESA staff have been very active the past year instituting a number of new initiatives to better serve our Certified Ecologists and the Society. Please take a moment to review these current and future improvements to the Certification Program:

Adopted 2003

• $25 Late Application Fee collected between 1 February and 31 March
• ESA Membership Verification is now a required section of the certification application for all levels
• New terms of Certification: 1 July (year accepted)–30 June (five years hence). This change is to ensure that there are no gaps in coverage during the recertification process
• BPC Second Review Meeting—during the ESA Annual Meeting
• Evening Sessions during Annual Meeting

Adopted 2004

• Newsletters for certified ecologists (February–June–September)
• Annual BPC Reports submitted to ESA Governing Board
• Annual exhibits at ESA Annual Meetings

• Currently working on an online application submission to be in operation in the fall of 2004
• Enforce consistent membership renewals for all 5 years of Certification (2005)
• Coordinate with other scientific organizations and participate in their meetings
• Create an “emeritus” status for retired certified ecologists

On behalf of all of our certified ecologists and the Board of Professional Certification I thank you for supporting the certification program and considering our report. We look forward to seeing you this August in Portland.

Professional Certification Program
February 2004 Newsletter

The Board of Professional Certification (BPC) is proud to launch the first Newsletter for Certified Ecologists. You can expect to receive this Newsletter during the months of February, June, and September for as long as you are certified. This newsletter will include information regarding changes to the Certification process, updates on various BPC activities, events hosted by the BPC, and other interesting and informative topics!

Please be advised that you are invited and encouraged as certified ecologists to provide suggestions or comments regarding any topic discussed in this Newsletter.

BPC Meeting

The BPC Annual Review Meeting will be held Friday, 4 June 2004 at ESA headquarters. This purpose of this meeting will be to review each application received or postdated before 31 March, and to determine the certification status of each applicant. This time will also be used to discuss our progress on new initiatives and our plans to achieve the following long-term goals:

• Increase visibility of ESA’s Certification Program
• Convey the importance of Certification as Ecologists to ESA members and others working inside and outside the field of ecology
• Promote the importance of Ethics to Ecologists
• Initiate communication and the sharing of ideas among current and future Certified Ecologists
• Increase the percentage of Certified Ecologists within ESA’s membership. (In 2003, out of 8116 members, 333 [only 4.1%] were current certified ecologists)
• Provide current and future ESA Certified Ecologists with a Certification Program that is responsive to their needs and promotes the benefits of certification in the workplace

Updates to certification process (since 1999)

• Secondary Deadline (31 March) has been added to the certification process to urge applicants to submit their applications by 1 February (Primary Deadline) or be responsible for the late fee of $25, collected 2 February–31 March. Please be advised that if this amount is not paid, it could result in the BPC returning your application without review.
• Streamlined Process is exclusively for ESA members with at least 10 years of experience beyond their Ph.D (applicants who obtained their Ph.D on or before June 1994).
• Membership Verification is now a required section of the Certification Application for all levels. Please be sure that you provide proof of membership if you have not received a membership confirmation by the time you submit your certification application.
• New Terms: 1 July (year accepted)–30 June (five years hence). Please also be advised that your current certification term has been extended to 30 June, following your initial expiration year. (Example: If your certificate reflects a date expiring in December of any year, it will be extended to 30 June.) This should avoid any gap in your certification while your renewal application is processed. In the future it will ensure that you will have a continual certification. Documentation of this extension is available upon request.
• BPC Second Review in August is held during ESA’s Annual Meeting. The purpose of this meeting will be to review any information requested from applicants after the first Review Meeting in June. Please be aware that if the requested information is not received during the allotted time, or if the information received does not fulfill the BPC’s request, your application may be automatically denied.

Certification events

Our Evening Session held at last year’s Annual Meeting, “Certification and the Workplace,” was very successful and sparked quite a bit of interest in the Certification Program. Another Evening Session titled “Ethics and Ecologists,” is scheduled to be held during this year’s ESA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon (look for more information in June 2004 Newsletter and on the ESA web site ‹www.esa.org›).

We plan to invite three speakers, representing academia, government, and the private sector. The speakers will discuss the role of ethics in establishing an ethically fair, reasonable, and technically sound basis for the practice of ecology. The panel will cite specific examples and future challenges facing ecologists.

Suggestions for speakers will be collected until 31 May. When providing suggestions please be sure to include contact information and reasons why this person should be a speaker during this event. In addition, those who participated in last year’s Evening Session, please feel free to contact us with suggestions on how to make this year’s Evening Session an even bigger success.

While certification is not the central focus of this session, the BPC is sure that there will be ample opportunity to discuss certification’s role in maintaining ethical standards within the ESA and the professional workplace.

A look ahead

The BPC is working on a number of topics intended to bring us closer to achieving our long-term goals. Listed below are a few projects now in the preliminary stage of development:

• 2004–2005 Budget proposal during the May 2004 Governing Board Meeting. We want to begin regular communication to the Governing Board to advise them of BPC activities and the needs expressed by our certified ecologists.
• Last December the BPC was awarded a Planning Grant from ESA to purchase and equip a Portable ESA Certification Display. The display will be available for BPC members to take to various scientific meetings held throughout the year. We plan on having the display up at this year’s SWS annual meeting in Seattle, and we’ll be looking for other opportunities thereafter. This will increase the visibility of the Certification Program for ESA members and others working in the field of ecology. It will also provide an opportunity for many to talk to a BPC member.
• We are in the process of developing an Online Certification Process for 2005. The benefits to each of you and future applicants are obvious, not to mention the fact that we will save a forest of trees by eliminating the need to submit nine copies of the application form.

We hope that many of you will have thoughts and suggestions on these projects and will email them to us at: esahq@esa.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

ESA Certification Program Calendar of Upcoming Events and Deadlines

February/ March:
Late Fee ($25) applied to all applications received after this date. All applications post-marked between the dates of 2 February and 31 March should include the Late Fee in the payment. If this payment was not included in the certification fee by the applicant, he/she will be invoiced.

April:
Final deadline 31 March. ANY applications/ payments/ recommendation letters postmarked after this date may cause the application to be held for next year’s review.

May:
ESA Headquarters Staff Prepares Applications for Review. Register for the Annual Meeting and sign up for the BPC Evening Session “Ethics in Ecology.”

June:
In early June The Board of Professional Certification Review takes place. The Board will determine if applications are accepted, denied, accepted at lower level, accepted at higher level, or if additional information is needed. Notification of Certification Status will be mailed and questions regarding the results may be sent in response. Deadline for Additional Information is 15 July. ANY documents postmarked after this date will be held for next year’s review.

July/August:
ESA Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon.
BPC Evening Session “Ethics in Ecology”
The Board of Professional Certification will hold its Final Review. Notification of Certification Status will be mailed and questions regarding the results and/or appeal requests may be sent in response.

August:
Certification Process Ends - for Current Year ApplicantsAppeals and General Inquiries ONLY

Kevin Erwin, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE

Members: Wendy Anderson, Chair; Deborah Goldberg, Nat Holland, Douglas Kelt, Clive Jones, Sharon Lawler, Walt Whitford

1) Revolving membership

Upon reviewing the membership of this committee and in response to suggestions by the ESA staff, we will begin enforcing a 3-year revolving membership for the committee.
Term expiring in 2004: Sharon Lawler and Deborah Goldberg
Term expiring in 2005: Wendy Anderson and Douglas Kelt
Term expiring in 2006: Clive Jones, Walt Whitford, Nat Holland

We recommend Jonathan Chase (Washington University) and Michael Peek (currently at Utah State University but moving to William Paterson University) to replace Sharon and Deborah for the upcoming year. Jon and Mike have agreed to serve on the committee upon approval of the board. Wendy Anderson will remain as chair for one more year.

2) Forrest Shreve Desert Research Award

Charles Price from the University of Arizona was the 2004 recipient of the Forrest Shreve Desert Research Award. His proposed project, “Scaling mass and morphology in Sonoran Desert Plants through space and time,” was ambitious, well planned, feasible, and was ranked highly by most of the members of the committee. Only $1300 was available for funding for this year, which was only 60% of the applicant’s request.

3) Robert H. Whittaker Travel Fellowship

Dr. Lohengrin Cavieres of the Unversidad de Concepcion in Chile was the 2004 recipient of the Robert H. Whittaker Travel Fellowship. He proposed to collaborate with Dr. Clive Jones of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies on “Cushion plant ecosystem engineering and the altitudinal range distribution of species in the Chilean Andes.” His proposal was ranked first by all committee members. Only $650 was available for funding for this year, which was only 50% of the applicant’s request.

4) Funding issues

After posting the call for proposals, receiving and reviewing proposals, and trying to determine how many proposals to fund and at what level, the committee chair checked with the financial officer to see what funds were available for this year. The funds available for both awards were significantly lower than in years past and lower than we had posted as the range for proposals. Several committee members thought this was embarrassing and unfortunate, and offered suggestions for ways to improve the level of funding in the future.
a) Inform Society members that these awards are not highly endowed, and that contributions from members would benefit the students and foreign scientists applying for them by enhancing the endowed fund.
b) The committee chair should be informed of (or check on) the funds available for each year’s awards prior to the posting of the announcement, so that applicants can create budgets that are within the range of the funds available.
c) If the interest on each endowment for any given year is less than $2000, or if no strong proposals are submitted in any given year, funding for that year should be skipped.
d) The Society is large enough and financially stable enough to subsidize from a general fund the funding for either award, when the interest on the endowment is not sufficient to meet the traditional amount of $2000.

5) Meeting luncheon presentation and poster

Most of the committee members agreed that we should implement an annual luncheon at the ESA meeting for committee members and previous and current year’s award recipients. During this time, previous year recipients would give a 10-minute synopsis of the project for which they used their funds. This would help formalize our process, encourage participation in the meeting by committee members and award recipients, and increase the visibility, prestige, and accountability of the awards and their recipients. We would also like, beginning in 2005, to add a small poster and a synopsis of the projects for each recipient on the Awards board at the meeting.

Wendy B. Anderson
Grants and Fellowship Committee Chair

Back to Table of Contents

MEETINGS COMMITTEE

Status of the Portland 2004 Meeting

Total Abstracts accepted as of 12 July: 2,722

Abstracts submitted by category:
Symposia 195
Organized Oral Session 298
Contributed Oral Session 1,326
Poster 915

Number of sessions:
Symposia 24
Contributed Orals 142
Organized Orals 36
Special Sessions 5
Discussions 6
Workshops 21 (cancelled 2)
Evening Sessions 21
Ticketed Events 10 (includes 3 Special Ticketed Events, does not include Grab-n-Go Lunches)
Field Trips and Tours 25 (cancelled 7)
SEEDS 9

New programmatic aspects of the 2004 Portland meeting:

• · Organized Oral Sessions (see subheading and discussion below)
• · 15 + 5 Oral Session Schedule (see subheading and discussion below)
• · Special Sessions – We have five of these scheduled, 1 1/2 hour sessions that are of general interest, and not necessarily pure science.
• · The Opening Plenary now includes the Awards and the Keynote Speaker.
• · A number of special and unique events at the meeting this year: e.g., Pacific Northwest Poets and Authors Session; Federal Leadership Plenary Wednesday morning, enabling “family” meetings of both USGS and FS agencies, with their Director/Chief; the Lewis & Clark theme is popular with session proposers, as reflected throughout the Program including Evening Sessions and Field Trips.
• · We have scheduled a 2-hour lunch break, giving time for 1 1/2 hour lunch break Workshops, and time for Grab-n-Go Lunches, which are extremely popular.
• · For the second year we have scheduled a Closing Plenary Summary Breakfast. This received good reviews in last year’s post meeting evaluation, and this year’s registration for this event is already over last year’s attendance.

Various other operational changes and innovations for Portland:

• · We are in the second year of a 3-year phase-out of the printed Abstract Volumes. This year everyone receives an indexed CD-ROM (which costs $5.25 per CD-ROM) and they can trade it for a printed volume while supplies last (which cost $13 per printed volume). We will have three CD-ROM Abstract kiosks for reading abstracts ONLY (no Internet). Next year there will be no printed Abstracts—saving money and trees!
• · The Preliminary Program is available only on the web site; no mailed program or CD-ROM; Save the Date postcard mailed in March;
• · More Wednesday field trips (sold out); Short am field trips on weekday mornings (sold out);
• · More SEEDS activities and events;
• · Coffee/tea service longer hours—more locations—additional cost partially covered by sale of insulated recycled mugs;
• · Recycling of lanyards, name badges to assist greening;
• · Not providing Overhead Projectors or 35-mm slides projectors except on request; 99% of speakers are now using PowerPoint;
• · Using real-time housing bureau reservations system allowing us to monitor hotel pick up on a daily basis from ESA HQ—no delay in reservations. By next year our Meeting Registration system will also be real time, enabling us to handle field trip and workshop registrations far more efficiently than in the past.
• · Some of the workshops that are offered every year are beginning to show a substantially lower registration, whereas very solid workshops, offered for the first time, have shown a very healthy registration this year. This suggests that some perennial workshop offerings might benefit from being offered every other year.
• · We originally planned 22 field trips and three tours (25) and we cancelled 7 (5 overnight trips and 2 day trips). Paul Ringold and Ellen Cardwell have passed on to the Local Hosts in Montreal some lessons and patterns from this year’s experience.
• · The Abstract Submission Fee has definitely reduced the high number of late cancellations and no shows. But it has been administratively awkward and time consuming. Based on the Board’s advice in Savannah, this year we lowered the $50 abstract submission fee to $40 for talks of all types and $25 for posters. The fee is no longer rebated or credited from the registration. While this is still not a flawless system, it has proven less of a problem to collect or track this year and there have been a minimal number of complaints.

Symposium proposal review process

We received 60 symposium proposals for the 2004 Portland meeting. This exceeds the previous record of 52 proposals submitted for the Savanna meeting. The increasing number of proposals probably reflects both a growing interest in participation in the Annual Meeting, and enthusiasm for the locations and themes of the meetings. However, with a cap of 24 symposia for the Annual Meeting (as directed by the Governing Board), the increased number of proposals means that the competition for these slots is increasingly intense. Hence, the review process needs to be fair and balanced, and some provision for meeting the interests of the rejected sessions needs to be considered.

A thorough review process involving members of the Meetings Committee, the ESA Section chairs, and several members of the Governing Board has been implemented, and seems to be working fairly well. This is a time-consuming process, however, and following through with all of the needed reviews and selection usually means that final selection of symposia may not occur until early January. An accelerated process for proposal submission and review would be necessary for meeting earlier meeting deadlines.

Organized Oral Sessions (described below) seem to be a viable option for tapping into the interest of the membership in organizing their own sessions, as indicated by the large number of symposium proposals.

Organized Oral Sessions

In Savannah we experimented with a set of five sessions that we called “Organized Oral Sessions” (OOS). The format allowed session organizers to assemble a set of related talks prior to the meeting that would not necessarily rise to the expected level of broad importance for symposia, but would offer a more coherent session than is usually the case with the ad hoc collections of related talks in Oral Contributed Sessions. The OOS were well received in Savannah, so we greatly expanded the number of these to 36 at the Portland Meeting. These 36 were selected from a combination of OOS proposals and rejected but highly ranked symposium proposals. This strategy of offering OOS sessions to a selected set of symposium proposers seems to have worked well. In some cases symposium proposers declined the offer, but many accepted. This seems to be a good outlet for their interest and enthusiasm for organizing a session, as well as including sessions with good scientific merit.

We shall see what the postmeeting survey reveals about participant’s satisfaction with this format. At this point, it seems likely that the OOS have at least partly satisfied a need mentioned before in surveys and in discussions among the Meetings Committee members and others—that the Annual Meeting should include more opportunity for sessions organized in advance. Advantages include better coherence and flow of these sessions than some Contributed paper sessions, which are assembled from contributed abstracts by topic in an ad hoc fashion by the Program Chair and Assistant. Also, these sessions may bring more midcareer and senior scientists to the Annual Meeting as invited speakers, because some of these people seem more likely to attend and present at the meeting if they are invited to participate in a session.

15 + 5 minute contributed and organized oral session schedule

In recent years contributed oral paper sessions have been criticized as being too hectic, too fast paced, and plagued by constant interruptions and noise during presentations by the coming/going of audiences. This year at Portland we are experimenting with a 15 + 5 minute schedule for all Contributed and Organized Oral Sessions. This is a change from the 12 + 3 minute schedule of past years (i.e., all oral contributed talks were up to 12 minutes in length, with 3 minutes between talks for questions and introduction of the next speaker). We believe the new 15 + 5 schedule will improve quality and depth of the talks, slow down the rather hectic pace of the oral sessions, and provide more opportunity for interaction between the speaker and audience.

2005 Annual Meeting in Montreal

Plans for the joint ESA/INTECOL 2005 Montreal meeting are well underway. Program Co-Chairs Paul Ringold and Rebecca Sharitz have issued the call for Symposia and Organized Oral Session proposals. The web site is at: ‹http://www.esa.org/montreal/›

Local Host Committee Chairs
Dr. Rachael O’Malley of San Jose State University was chosen to chair the Local Host Committee for the 2007 Annual Meeting in San Jose, California. Dr. Gretchen Meyer of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has agreed to serve as the local host for the 2008 Milwaukee Annual Meeting.

Future Annual Meeting sites
The process to choose locations for the 2009 Annual Meeting and beyond has been put on hold while the Society decides whether to hold an annual meeting in Mexico. The Meetings Committee along with ESA’s Meetings Coordinator are trying to locate a suitable site in Mexico that has facilities with 16 or more meeting rooms each with a capacity over 150 that are located in close proximity to each other, has inexpensive lodging options (e.g., dormitories), and has adequate transportation for 2000 or more attendees. We have not yet found the right site. As we continue our search, we are planning for a smaller (400–600 person) “themed” meeting for January of 2006 in Mexico to test the feasibility of holding the larger Annual Meeting there.

Last fall, the Future Meetings chair along with ESA staff visited Calgary, Alberta as a possible meeting site once the Mexico meeting issue has been resolved. It is essential that ESA continue to schedule its Annual Meetings at least 5 years in advance to ensure that the best sites, facilities, and rates are available at the time we want them. In addition, choosing sites 5 years out gives the Society maximum leverage in negotiations to improve the “green” features of the meeting, transportation, and other important aspects of the meeting facilities. When we know what dates are available, we will bring Calgary to the Governing Board for consideration. 

Concluding comments

The Meeting Committee is grateful to ESA staff for their terrific support, especially Ellen Cardwell. The Program Chair’s assistant at the University of Arizona, Dr. Dave Grow, has been a key person, making sure the hard, detailed work gets done. His expertise and organizational skills have been essential, and we are fortunate that Dave will continue to work in this position through the 2005 meeting in Montreal.

Tom Swetnam, Co-Chair
Steve Chaplin, Co-Chair

Back to Table of Contents

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND APPEALS COMMITTEE

The Professional Ethics and Appeals Committee (PEAC) has been inactive for several years. Patricia Flebbe has agreed to chair the committee. She and vice president Carol Brewer are in the process of selecting members for the committee.

Patricia A. Flebbe, Chair

PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE

The Publications Committee commissioned a review of the Editor-in-Chief of Ecology and Ecological Monographs and passed on its recommendations to the Governing Board. The Committee recently began a similar review of the EiC for Ecological Applications, with the goal of having the review completed by the November Governing Board meting.

The Committee also recommended that Ed Johnson replace Al Solomon as Bulletin Editor beginning January 2005. We thank Al for his tremendous contributions to ESA and the Bulletin.

The Publications Committee continued to monitor issues pertaining to data access, especially as it relates to the journals of the Society. This continues to be a rapidly changing phenomenon.
The Committee will be reviewing the ESA web site (at the request of the Governing Board), and discussing the price structure of ESA publications.

Committee members: Emily Bernhardt, John Briggs, Aaron Ellison, Susan Harrison, Laura Huenneke, Nancy Huntly, Steve Jackson, Alan Knapp, Robert Peet, David Roberts, Sam Scheiner

Jim Reichman, Chair

PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (see Report of the Vice President for Public Affairs)

RESEARCH COMMITTEEE (see Report of the Vice President for Science)

SUSTAINABLE BIOSPHERE INITIATIVE (SBI) COMMITTEE

SBI Steering Committee activities were largely put on hold this year, pending the release of the report from the Ecological Visions Committee, and due to the fact that no funds were available for our annual spring meeting.

The Ecological Visions Committee Report has now been released. There has also been much conversation about the redundancy in existing ESA committees (e.g., specifically the Research Committee and the SBI Committee). We thus decided to have a joint committee meeting between the SBI Committee and the Research Committee at the annual ESA Meeting in Portland this August to discuss the recent VISIONS Report and Science paper and to enhance communication between these two committees.

Catherine Pringle, Chair

Back to Table of Contents
V. REPORTS OF SECTIONS

APPLIED ECOLOGY SECTION

The Applied Ecology Section of ESA is the third oldest of the active sections within this Society. The Section was established in 1971, and has a twofold purpose: (1) to facilitate communication of the application of ecological principles to the solution of practical environmental problems, and (2) to encourage liaison with specialists in policy, administration, planning, health, agriculture, and natural resource management who use ecological principles in resolutions of their problems.

Mixer and Business Meeting ESA Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon

The Applied Ecology, Agroecology, Rangeland Ecology, and Soil Ecology Sections once again held a joint mixer at the ESA 2004 meeting in Portland, Oregon. The mixer was on Wednesday, 4 August from 6:30 to 8:00 pm, at the Oregon Convention Center. The Applied Section held a business meeting at the end of the mixer to discuss the 2004 elections and introduce the new officers.

Elections

Results of the elections for officers for 2004–2006 were not available until late July. Candidates for the position of Chair were Deborah Potter ‹dapotter@fs.fed.us› and Martin Spetich ‹mspetich@fs.fed.us›; for Vice Chair, Becky Kay Kerns ‹bkerns@fs.fed.us›; and for Secretary, Neal Butt ‹nbutt@cabq.gov›, in addition to any write-in candidates. Election results and new officer biosketches will be posted at ‹http://www.esa.org/applied/›.

Student Travel Award

The Applied Ecology Section selected Justin Touchon, a Ph.D student in the Department of Biology at Boston University, to receive a $750 Student Travel Award to attend the 89th ESA Annual Meeting this summer. He presented his research on the interactions of biotic and abiotic risks affecting eggs and larvae of the neotropical tree frog Hyla ebraccata in the symposium “Ecological Implications of Phenotypic Plasticity.”

2004 Symposium

This year we sponsored the symposium “Ecological Implications of Fuel Reduction Treatments to Reduce Fire Hazards in Forested Landscapes.” The symposium was held Thursday, 5 August, from 1:30 to 5:00 pm, at the Oregon Convention Center, Oregon Ballroom 204. Many forests today are denser, contain fewer large trees, and have higher fuel loads and greater fuel continuity, increasing the probability of unnaturally severe wildfires. The symposium brought together researchers affiliated with several large multidisciplinary fuel reduction and stand structure manipulation experiments nationwide. Speakers presented findings from different study disciplines in order to provide the best current understanding of potential ecosystem-level impacts of fuel reduction treatments.

Paulette Ford, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

ASIAN ECOLOGY SECTION

In 2004, the Asian Ecology Section focuses on the issue of invasive species, providing productive forums for discussing research, management, and policy about biological invasions between eastern Asia and North America. Our plan calls for organizing two international symposiums on the subject.

The issue of biological invasions by nonindigenous plants and animals is of great ecological importance because such invasions may become major global threats that alter landscapes, reduce biodiversity, and endanger national economies. Eastern Asia and North America share a wide range of similar environments and related biota, which may result in each region being more susceptible to the immigrant species from the other region than from many other parts of the world. Exchanges of alien plants and animals across the Pacific Ocean are increasing markedly as commerce between these two distant regions has soared in the past few decades. As a result of this commerce, an unknown number of accidental and deliberate immigrant species have and will arrive in both regions; some of these alien species will form invasions. Thus, there is an urgent need to promote effective international communication, collaboration, and cooperation between ecologists, policy-makers, and quarantine officers in both Eastern Asia and North America, so that the experience, research results, and resources of investigators may be shared for combating these common environmental and economic threats.

The Asian Ecology Section cosponsored the Beijing International Symposium on Biological Invasions, held 8–15 June 2004 in Beijing, China. This symposium, entitled “Species Exchanges between Eastern Asia and North America: Threats to Environment and Economy,” was a great success. It had endorsement and financial support from the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) and the Sino-Ecologists Club Overseas (SINO-ECO). The symposium had 107 participants, of which 62 were from within China and 45 from overseas countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The symposium had 48 oral presentations (including the keynote speeches by Dr. Harold Mooney of Stanford University and Dr. Richard Mack of Washington State University) and 37 poster presentations.

The Asian Ecology Section is also organizing a symposium in this year’s ESA Annual Meeting at Portland, Oregon. The symposium, entitled “Inter-continental Invasions of Non-native Species between Eastern Asia and North America,” will be held 8:00–11:30 am on 2 August. This is going to be a regular ESA symposium because our efforts to obtain funding necessary to support participation of experts from Asian countries were unsuccessful. Eight talks are scheduled.

We believe that these symposia will increase research activities and influence policy-making on the subject in Asian countries, which constitute a critical link in the fight against biological invasions caused by exchanges of alien plants and animals across the Pacific Ocean.

Harbin Li, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

BIOGEOSCIENCES SECTION

The ESA Biogeosciences Section was formed last year. This year, the Section electronically elected Lars Hedin (Princeton University) as Chairperson, and Christine Goodale (Cornell University) as Secretary.
The Section now has over 270 members.
At this year’s ESA meeting, the Section has sponsored the following events:

Interactions with representatives from both the Division of Environmental Biology and the Division of Earth Sciences at the NSF, to participate in our annual Section meeting, and briefly engage us on directions and opportunities at the NSF.

Two symposia with biogeoscience themes

One symposium was organized by Alan Townsend and Jason Neff on “Frontiers in the Biogeosciences: Ecology and the Earth Sciences”; the other was organized by Pallaoor Sundareshwar with the subject, “Rediscovering Earth from Land to Sea: a Biogeoscience Perspective.” Both symposia involve speakers from the geosciences as well as ecological sciences.

Biogeosciences Graduate Student Breakfast

The breakfast was held between 7:00 and 8:00 am on Thursday, 5 August.  This breakfast is an opportunity for graduate students to socialize and build connections across universities and programs.  Bill Schlesinger, Jill Baron, and Lars Hedin will attend to help discuss any questions and/or concerns that might come up.

Lars O. Hedin, Chair

Back to Table of Contents
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS SECTION

I. Recap of 2003 Business Meeting and Evening Session

During the 2003 ESA Annual Meeting, the International Affairs Section (IAS) held its business meeting on 6 August. Immediately following the business meeting, the IAS held an Evening Session entitled: “Research in Less Developed Regions: A Lonely Planet for Researchers.” This was an informal session lead by researchers who have had extensive experience in the trials and tribulations of international research. Topics covered included: (1) sources of useful information before you go; (2) medical issues that come up while in the bush; (3) how to find in-country collaborators; and (4) the cross-cultural problems that different views of gender roles may present. It was a lively conversation and was greatly aided by the presence of attendees from many of the regions that were being discussed. We even had a handout of web resources for international researchers. Between the business meeting and evening session we had approximately 40 participants last year. That is a recent record for our Section!

II. Plans for the 2004 Meeting in Portland

Because of the success of the joint Business Meeting and Evening Session last year, we are trying it again this year. The Business Meeting will be on Monday, 2 August 2004. Immediately following the business meeting we will hold the evening session.

1) Evening Session EV-6.

“Researchers Without Borders: What You Should Know About Health Related Issues Before You Go!” Session description.: An important concern for researchers working in remote locations and in less developed countries is their physical health. How do you avoid getting sick? What do you do when a medical emergency arises for you or somebody on your team? In this session we will provide materials, and have members of a panel discuss their experience and give advice. Some topics we expect to cover include: insurance, finding a doctor, what to have in your medical kit, what to know or do before you go, and how to avoid foreseeable problems. Our goal is to provide individuals interested in doing research in remote, less developed regions of the world with some of the tools they will need to prevent medical emergencies and to deal with them should they arise.

2) Sponsored symposium

This year I am pleased to announce that the IAS will also be cosponsoring a symposium.

Symposium 23. “Ecological Theory and Rangeland Sustainability: Local Strategies, Global Solutions.” This symposium is being organized by Elizabeth King and Jeffrey Herrick (with some assistance from the Chair). Every ecosystem on the planet is managed to some extent by humans, ranging from traditional stewardship by local indigenous inhabitants to broad policies by international agencies. Ecological knowledge is fundamental to understanding human impacts, but achieving more sustainable land use ultimately depends on linking and integrating ecological knowledge with the priorities, constraints, and attitudes of land users and policymakers. This symposium addresses the following questions: How do theoretical and empirical ecology research help us to define and evaluate sustainability? Can ecological concepts of sustainability be integrated with different social perspectives in order to improve land use practices? Is there adequate communication between ecologists and policymakers at various levels to effectively promote sustainability? Rangelands, which cover >50% of the earth’s land surface, will serve as a common context for speakers to discuss these issues, with examples from developing and industrialized countries on five continents. The symposium aims to identify common weak points in the ecology–society interface, and offer strategies to counteract those weaknesses and promote sustainability worldwide. This looks to be a very good symposium so please attend.

III. Next Business Meeting

Currently the position of secretary for the IAS is unfilled. We will attempt to elect somebody to this position at our next business meeting. In addition to the secretary position, we will also look for somebody to be “webmaster” for the Section. The webmaster will be responsible for updating and then maintaining our Section pages at the ESA web site.

Jacoby Carter, Chair
USGS National Wetlands Research Center

Back to Table of Contents
LONG-TERM STUDIES SECTION

This year has been one of regrouping and reorganization. All of the Section leadership positions are open for election at the 2004 meeting.

Chair: Art McKee (resigned)
Vice Chair, and Acting Chair: Mark Stromberg
Secretary: Jennifer Jenkins
Councilor: David Coleman
Councilor: Laura F. Huenneke

Mark Stromberg, last-elected and acting Section Chairperson, obtained a list of e-mail addresses of ESA members paying dues in the LTSS. After several messages to the larger group, about 20 individual members have agreed to meet in Oregon to reorganize, define new Section priorities, and develop plans for 2004–2005. To aid this, John Porter developed an interactive web site for the Section ‹http://www.esa.org/longterm›. Several people have suggested that the LTSS investigate ways to support individual ESA members who have developed long-term ecological data sets, or to retrieve such data sets from faculty who are no longer actively adding to the data sets. Other topics of interest include:

• support student travel to ESA Annual Meeting
• provide online forums for members
• sponsor a symposium at the ESA Annual Meetings
• provide listings of long-term data and projects
• publish articles in the ESA Bulletin

A meeting of the LTSS is planned for the Oregon Meetings. The Long-term Studies Section Business Meeting and Brown Bag Lunch will be on Tuesday, 3 August, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm.

Mark Stromberg, Acting Chair

Back to Table of Contents

PALEOECOLOGY SECTION

The Paleoecology Section held its annual business meeting during the 2003 ESA Annual Meeting in Savanna, Georgia. Dan Gavin chaired the meeting; Beth Lynch acted as secretary in Holly Ewing’s absence. Elections for the 2003–2004 officers were held and Bob Booth was elected vice-chair. Bryan Shuman moved from vice-chair to chair. Holly Ewing continues her position as secretary for a year and then will be replaced by Beth Lynch. Jason Lynch continues as Deevey Award Committee chair. Several possible symposium ideas were discussed, and the Section voted to sponsor a 2004 symposium proposal on paleoecological records of wildfire. We decided that the topic would be suitable for the 2004 meeting in the Pacific Northwest and could be linked to a local field trip. Bryan Shuman subsequently proposed and organized the symposium entitled, “Cultural and Environmental Controls on Past Fire Regimes in Inhabited Woodlands.” Colin Long is organizing a related field trip after the 2004 Annual Meeting.

In addition to the well-attended Paleoecology oral and poster sessions, the Section sponsored a symposium and an evening discussion at the Savanna meetings. The symposium, “Severe insect outbreaks in North American forests: recent trends, long-term recurrence, and the role of climate,” organized by Dan Gavin and Matt Ayres, stimulated an exciting dialog between paleoecologists and forest entomologists. Few conversations have taken place between these communities before, and it was successful and eye-opening. The discussion enabled an important exchange of ideas, particularly regarding the mid-Holocene decline of Tsuga populations across eastern North America.

The evening discussion, “Future Directions in Paleoecology,” was organized and moderated by Bryan Shuman. Steve Jackson and Dick Brugam spoke on trends in terrestrial and aquatic paleoecology. The discussion was attended by 40 people. We discussed the need to use numerous new techniques to question and explore long-held assumptions and previously intractable problems (“the things we don’t talk about in polite company”). We created a list of five broad themes for the next five years: (1) “Baseline” studies on the range of ecological and climatic variability (e.g., fire frequency). (2) Multiple proxy studies to examine interactions among difference components of the ecosystem (e.g., responses of plant communities to climate change). (3) Studies of poorly understood long-term phenomena, such as the consequence of changes in atmospheric CO2 levels, millennial- and longer scale changes in within-species genetic variability. (4) Rigorous tests of proxies and techniques. And (5) Development of new interdisciplinary collaborations. We also discussed a list of “classic” papers.

Don Falk of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona was awarded the 2003 Edward S. Deevey Award for an Outstanding Student Presentation in Paleoecology. His presentation was entitled “The event–area relationship: scale dependence in the fire regime of a New Mexico ponderosa pine forest.” Don used a novel statistical approach to describe how parameters that describe the forest fire regime are scale dependent.

Our e-mail newsletter continues to reach 230 participants.

Bryan Shuman, Chair

PHYSIOLOGICAL ECOLOGY SECTION

New Secretary

Gretchen North took over as Secretary of the Section on 1 January 2004. Gretchen is Associate Professor of Biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Russ Monson continues as President of the Section until the end of this year. Announcement of an election for a new President will be made at the annual mixer in Portland.

Student awards

Last year Katherine McCulloh won the 2003 Billings Award for her talk, “The application of Murray’s law to Psilotum nudum, an analogue of an ancestral vascular plant,” with John Sperry as coauthor. Kate’s work was conducted at the University of Utah. Patrick Herron won the 2003 Best Poster Award, for his poster “Divining rods: Pseudomonas putida as a microbiosensor of fine-scale osmotic potentials in soil,” with coauthors Daniel J. Gage and Zoe G. Cardon. Patrick’s work was conducted at the University of Connecticut.

Development of Section prize support

The Section has continued to foster support for its Billings Award in the form of a $500 contribution by the New Phytologist Trust. Additionally, we are working with representatives of the journal Plant, Cell and Environment to possibly contribute financial support for the Best Student Poster Award. Finally, Zoe Cardon, our past Section Secretary, arranged with Chuck Crumly of Academic Press (Elsevier) to make available a free book of the student’s choice (from AP list of books <$100) to the winners of the Best Poster and the Billings Awards, as well as to the students receiving Honorable Mention in these contests.

Booth at the Annual Meeting

The Section took the initiative to consolidate student awards programs at ESA. We now have a dedicated student awards booth each year, with winning posters shown from the previous year, and with boxes for ballots (and judging information). This helps us highlight the research that students are doing across ESA, and helps with judging confusion over Buell, Braun, Billings, and Best Poster.

Annual meeting symposia

In 2003, the Section sponsored a symposium organized by Miquel Gonzalez-Meler (University of Illinois, Chicago) and entitled “Respiratory Control of the Global C Cycle in a Changing Environment: A Search for New Integrative Tools.” The symposium included talks by Joe Berry, Mike Ryan, Dave Bowling, Jim Raich, Sue Trumbore, Julie Jastrow, and Evan DeLucia.

This summer (2004), the Section Symposium has been organized by Bill Bowman (University of Colorado, Boulder) and is entitled “Functional Significance of Mountain Biodiversity.” The symposium will bring together scientists working in a variety of ecological disciplines to present their research linking the role of biodiversity to the functioning of mountain ecosystems. The symposium is part of a series of thematic workshops supported by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment ‹http://www.unibasel.ch/gmba/index.html›, a program within DIVERSITAS and GCTE. Contributors include Richard Bardgett (University of Lancaster), Steve Schmidt (University of Colorado), Christian Rixen (Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research), Christian Körner (University of Basel), Bill Bowman (University of Colorado), Molly Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and Rüdiger Kaufmann (University of Innsbruck).

Section concerns

Two principal concerns continue to face the Section. (a) Finding the financial means to maintain the Section web site, and (b) finding ways to enhance interactions with other sections in ESA and in other scientific societies. The Physiological Ecology web site is often offered as the premier example of how an ESA Section web site should look and be maintained. Unfortunately, the long-term status of this site is in question. The site exists in its current state because of the good will of Rob Jackson, the former Section president and developer of the site. Rob continues to maintain the site without compensation. Rob is willing to continue in “volunteer” mode for some time, but some financial resources will need to be found for the longer term if the site is to be maintained for the life of the Section. Upon becoming Section president in 2003, Russ Monson developed this issue as a high priority. Monson made the case to certain members of the ESA Board for financial assistance to hire a student for 5–10 hours per week; unfortunately, funds are not available to support this request. The issue remains a concern of the Section without an identified solution. Below is a quotation from one of Monson’s messages to Norm Christensen (Board Treasurer) on this issue:

“On January 1, I took over as President of the Physiological Ecology Section in the ESA. I have been communicating with Rob Jackson, our past President, about the issue of our Section web page. To date, the Section page has been maintained by Rob on a voluntary basis. This takes an incredible amount of time given the extensive listing of job opportunities and meeting announcements that he has to organize and transmit. In my opinion, the Section web site is the “heart” of our Section; it is the site where we announce job opportunities, meetings, recent funding agendas, and news about our Section awards. I noticed that very few other sections have web sites; the Population Ecology Section has a site maintained by Gordon Fox at the University of South Florida, and the Statistical Ecology Section has a site maintained by John Porter at the University of Virginia. I would like to make the case that section web sites represent a crucial resource to the Society, and one that facilitates the “local” connection to society members. Section web pages have the potential to greatly enhance the potential for the Society as a whole to reach its members, offer opportunities to students, and strengthen the sense of “connection” between members and the Society. In today’s web-savvy society, and with so many of our younger members turning to the web first for information, I would make the case that web enhancement is critical to our ability to serve our membership. It is my guess that the reason more sections don’t have web pages is because of the time required to keep the site updated. I am wondering if there has been any discussion at higher levels within the Society to support the development of Section web pages. If not, I would like to know how I might get something like this on the Society’s agenda. I am starting this message with you, since ultimately this is likely to be a financial issue—money is needed to develop and maintain web sites.” (Sent to Norm Christensen, February 2003.).

In January 2004, Russ Monson (President) and Gretchen North (Secretary) sent a questionnaire to the Section membership to better gauge current trends and opinions. Here is a summary of the questionnaire that we just submitted to Section members within the text of our annual newsletter:

Report on Physiological Ecology survey

Last winter Gretchen and Russ solicited comments from Section members in the form of a questionnaire. The aim of the questionnaire was to gain greater insight into the composition and opinions of the Section membership, and to lay the foundation for future initiatives within the Section. We received 55 completed questionnaires. It was difficult to collate all the varied responses into summary form. However, we have tried to capture some of the more obvious trends below:

1) The Section continues to be populated primarily by people who identify themselves as plant physiological ecologists. Of the respondents, 58% consider themselves plant physiological ecologists; 22% consider themselves animal physiological ecologists; 16% consider themselves ecosystem ecologists; 4% consider themselves a type of ecologist other than these three.

2) Most of the membership depends on the ESA Annual Meeting as their primary professional meeting venue. Of the respondents, 76% attend the ESA Annual Meeting as their primary meeting; 11% attend the SICB annual meeting as their primary meeting; 5% attend the AGU meeting as their primary meeting; 8% attend meetings other than these three as their primary meeting.

3) Most people think the field of physiological ecology will continue to diverge in two directions: down toward molecular connections, and up toward ecosystem and global connections. Of the respondents, 33% described this as the current trend and one that is likely to continue; 16% of the respondents expect evolutionary connections, particularly those involving phylogenetic analysis, to become more important in physiological ecology; 20% expect connections to molecular biology and genomics to become more important, including 90% of the animal physiological ecologists who responded.

4) Most of the respondents thought that the Section web site was the most critical component of the Section to maintain. Over 50% of the respondents mentioned the web site as one of the most valuable aspects of the Section; 22% of the respondents would like to see the web page enhanced to provide better interconnectedness among Section members; 20% of the respondents mentioned the possibility of using the web site to post information about courses (e.g., syllabi, reading lists, etc.) that could be used by others to enhance their physiological ecology courses. Several respondents mentioned the need to expand Section activities at the national meetings to include small Section-sponsored workshops on education topics or experimental techniques.

How do we use this information?

1) It was no surprise that most of the respondents recognized the trend in physiological ecology toward divergent directions—up and down in scale. Russ and Gretchen have identified two questions that should be asked concerning this recognition. Is the trend detrimental to Section cohesiveness? Is there anything we can do about the trend?

2) Clearly, one of the priorities for the Section should be to further develop and stabilize financial support for the web site. This will continue to be one of our priorities and one that Russ will pass on to the next Section president.

3) We still have members interested in animal physiological ecology (albeit a diminishing interest). We should identify a strategy to foster this part of the Section and rebuild it. This is most likely to come through continued efforts to strengthen the organismic core of the Section. Toward that end, we would like to encourage symposium proposals for next year’s meeting that will emphasize connections between animal and plant physiological ecology.

4) There is a need for Section-sponsored workshops, especially those focused on pedagogic issues and specialized research techniques and approaches. We will initiate discussions with ESA Central to see if we can get something scheduled for next year’s Annual Meeting in Montreal.

At the Section Mixer this year, we would like to take a few minutes to allow for some discussion of these issues. Furthermore, we would like to encourage the formation of a couple of “committees” to explore the issues further. In particular, it might be good to have a few people noodling about issue No. 1 above, and maybe a couple of volunteers to organize a workshop for the Montreal meeting. We will gather information before the mixer on the feasibility of adding at least one workshop to the Montreal agenda.

Russ Monson, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

PLANT POPULATION ECOLOGY

Over the past year, we have continued our efforts to provide Student Travel Awards, and we have opened discussions on how to update our web site. Below we summarize our activities and decisions:

Student travel awards to the 2004 ESA meetings

The Plant Population Biology Section was able to award three student travel awards to the 2004 ESA Meetings in Portland, Oregon ($300 each). Funds for the awards come, in part, from the success of our Section’s Silent Crafts Auction at the ESA meetings each year. These students will be recognized for their achievements at the Section’s Business and Social Mixer on 2 August at the ESA meetings in Portland, Oregon. The award recipients are:

Amy Blair, Colorado State University: “How to be a successful invader: the importance of genetic change in the invasion of a perennial plant (Silene latifolia).”

Beth Lawrence, Oregon State University: “Fitness effects of inbreeding and outbreeding on golden paintbrush (Castilleja levisecta): implications for recovery and reintroduction.”

Leah Dudley, University of Missouri: “Jack Sprat revisited: ecological niche partitioning in Salix glauca.”

Updating the Section’s web site

The mission of the Plant Population Biology Section is to encourage research, to promote collaboration and communication among a community of international plant population ecologists, and to sponsor meetings for the communication of results in all phases of plant population biology. To help meet these goals, our Section hosts a web site. The primary goal of the web site is to promote communication among Section members. The web site originated in the late 1990s, and was handwritten by Gordon Fox (University of South Florida).

Since the construction of the web site, the Section has grown and the current web site does not meet our goals. In particular, the current web site is fairly static and text-oriented. For example, the site does not have automated tools for updating directory information (thus Section members cannot keep in contact), for archiving relevant history for the Section (i.e., previous newsletters, sponsored symposia, student travel winners, etc.), and for posting news and events (i.e., jobs, new grant opportunities, undergraduate research opportunities, etc.).

In November of 2003, the Plant Population Biology and Statistics Sections jointly applied for an ESA Long-Range Planning Grant for funds to update both of our Section’s web sites. Unfortunately, the grant was not funded. From the feedback we obtained, the awards committee felt that updating web sites was not an activity that was substantial enough to warrant an ESA Long-Range Planning Grant.

At our Business Meeting in August, our Section will further discuss the needs of the Section and the ways the web site can be updated to help meet those needs. We will also discuss other avenues of funding. At this point, we have identified the following updates that need to be made to the web site:

1) Redesign the graphics of the web sites to make them user friendly.

2) Develop automated tools for updating the following archival information: officer lists, symposia sponsored by the Section, e-mails, newsletters, graduate student award recipients, directory updates, job postings at all academic levels (faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students), and funding opportunities. These automated update tools are essential to keep the web sites up to date and informative for Section members.

3) Move the host of the web site to ESA from the University of Southern Florida.

To implement these updates, we will need to hire a web designer to create a platform (the same platform could be used by the Plant Population Biology and Statistics Sections). We expect that we could hire someone for $100/hr, which is cheap by the standards of this area. The design of the web page is complex, including several automated or semiautomated features. Programming and testing will likely take 50 hours; thus the total cost of updating the web site will be $5,000.

Crafts Silent Auction at the 2004 (Portland) ESA Meetings

Once again, our Section will host a Crafts Silent Auction Booth at the ESA Meetings. The bulk of the proceeds from the Booth go to funding Student Travel Awards to the ESA Meetings. All items auctioned off are donated to the Section by Section members as well as other individuals interested in supporting the Section.

Call for symposium proposals for the 2005 ESA Meeting

Each year, the Plant Population Biology Section is allowed to sponsor one symposium proposal. The theme of the 2005 ESA meeting is: “Ecology at multiple scales.” At our Annual Business Meeting and Mixer, we will discuss ideas for symposium proposals. Because our Section is only allowed to endorse one proposal, if there are multiple Section members with ideas in mind, we will have an open discussion on the different topic ideas (although sponsorship is not necessary for inclusion in the final program).

Business Meeting agenda for Portland

The 2004 Business Meeting and Mixer of the Plant Population Biology Section will be held on Monday, 2 August from 6:30 to 8:00 pm. The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

• Announce new Chair (Randy Mitchell) and take nominations for a new Vice Chair.
• Present the Student Travel Awards.
• Discuss the Section’s web site.
• Discuss symposia for the 2005 ESA Meetings.
• Announcements and new items from the floor.

Current officers of the Plant Population Biology Section

Chair (2003–2004)
Rebecca Irwin
Department of Biological Sciences
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
E-mail: Rebecca.E.Irwin@dartmouth.edu

Vice-Chair (2003–2004)
Randall Mitchell
Department of Biology
University of Akron
Akron, OH 44325-3908
E-mail: Rjm2@uakron.edu

Rebecca E. Irwin Chair
Plant Population Biology Section

Back to Table of Contents

RANGELAND SECTION

Revisit 2003 activities at ESA

The Rangeland Section was active at the 2003 ESA meeting. We sponsored a symposium that was well attended and we had a workshop/discussion following our mixer/business meeting.

2003 Symposium. “Biogeochemistry of Grassland and Shrubland Ecosystems: Local to Regional Linkages and Impacts of Land Use.” Co-organizers: Bob Nowak and Sam Fuhlendorf.

The primary focus of this symposium was on the effects of land use and land use change on biogeochemical cycles of grasslands and shrublands. Biogeochemical cycles are central to many components of global change and land management, including increases in greenhouse gases, land conversion, and nitrogen deposition. The speaker list included prominent scientists from diverse backgrounds; the session was well attended by a broad group of ecologists. Topics covered included (1) the global role of rangelands in biogeochemical cycles, (2) cycles of urban and livestock wastes, (3) the role of disturbance and invasive species, (4) dust redistributions, (5) carbon sequestration and land management, and (6) the impacts of woody plant increases on biogeochemical cycles.

2003 Workshop/Discussion: ”Strategies for Increasing the Relevance of Rangeland Ecological Research.” Co-organizers: Jeff Herrick and Sam Fuhlendorf. This workshop focused on: (1) exploring opportunities for increasing the relevance of ecology to the management of grassland, shrubland, and savanna ecosystems, (2) defining strategies for increasing the ability of managers to apply the results of both basic and applied research in these ecosystems, and (3) considering options for collaboratively addressing each of the first two options together with the Society for Range Management. A good discussion led to several objectives that we have worked toward over the past year, including: (1) increasing opportunities for international participation in U.S. professional societies, (2) conducting joint symposia with other societies, and (3) encouraging ESA members to collect/report management-relevant data. Some of the resulting interactions with other societies are reported below.

ESA Rangeland Section at the Society for Range Management Meetings, Salt Lake City, Utah, 25–30 January 2004

The ESA Rangeland Section sponsored a symposium and a workshop at the Society for Range Management meeting.

2004 Symposium: The Big Stuff That Matters. Cosponsored by Lori Hidinger and Carolyn Hull Sieg, this symposium focused on defining the important issues facing rangeland ecosystems. Topics included climate change, biodiversity, human population, and landscape fragmentation. There was considerable discussion following the symposium on future directions and positions that the SRM should take on these topics.

2004 Symposium/workshop: Is Rangeland Ecology Relevant? Research Needs for Rangeland Management Research Needs in the 21st century

Cosponsors were Sam Fuhlendorf, Bob Budd, and Jeff Herrick. Ecological research often falls short of true application. It is clear that the large gap between science and application is driven by limitations in research, limited understanding of ecological science by managers, and perhaps most important a lack of communication between scientists and managers. This workshop focused on continuing the discussion from the ESA meeting to determine how ESA and the Society for Range Management can work together to help resolve these problems. Issues that have contributed to the lack of application of rangeland ecology research include (1) public perception of terms such as ecology and rangeland, (2) reduced funding from USDA for applied ecological work, (3) lack of political clout for rangeland ecology, (4) no mechanism to make research results understandable to the general public, and (5) a need to develop a solid and broad ecosystem management approach. At the completion of the program it was determined that this discussion was important and should continue.

Plans for ESA Rangeland Section at 2004 meeting in Portland

The Rangeland Section will again be busy at the ESA meeting in Portland. Activities that are sponsored by the Rangeland Section or organized by members that represent our Section are listed below.

• Business meeting/mixer will be held at 6:30 on Wednesday, 4 August. Finger foods and a cash bar will be available.
  
• Workshop/discussion will immediately follow the mixer. The topic will be “Ranches, Ranchettes, Recreation and Conservation: Strategies for Increasing the Contribution of Science to Land Use Debates.” The majority of this session will be devoted to an informal discussion of the topic. Organized by Jeff Herrick. Wednesday, 4 August, 8:00–10:00 pm.
  
• Symposium: “Ecohydrology: Towards an Ecologically Meaningful Water Budget,” co-organized by David Breshears and Osvaldo Sala. Tuesday, 3 August, 1:30–5:00 pm.
  
• Symposium: “Ecological Theory and Rangeland Sustainability: Local Strategies, Global Solutions,” co-organized by Elizabeth King, Jeffrey Herrick, and Jacoby Carter. Friday, 6 August, 8:30 am–12:00 noon.
  
• Organized Oral Session: “Interannual Climate Variability: How Temporal Signatures Can Drive Ecosystem Processes,” co-organized by Linda Wallace and Jay Arnone. Tuesday, 3 August, 1:30–5:00 pm.

Ongoing activities

Web site development: Section web site ‹http://www.ag.unr.edu/esa/›.

Rangeland forum web site (informal forum to post, describe, and discuss observations, data, and results). Section role: sponsor; lead contact: Bob Nowak ‹nowak@scs.unr.edu›

Society for Range Management, Annual Meeting, Fort Worth, Texas, 5–11 February 2005. We are currently planning a symposium and workshop that will be sponsored by the Rangeland Section of ESA.

Requests for evening session and symposium proposals for the 2005 Meeting in Montreal, Canada.

The Ecological Society of America and the International Association for Ecology will be holding a joint Annual meeting and International Congress in Montreal, Canada, 7–12 August 2005.

The Calls for Symposium Proposals and Organized Oral Session Proposals, as well as information about the joint meeting, the theme, the Palais des Congres (the Montreal Convention Center), and the city of Montreal are included on the ESA meeting web site ‹http://www.esa.org/montreal› The deadline for submission of proposals for Symposia and Organized Oral Sessions is Wednesday, 15 September 2004 at 5:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. Submissions will then be peer reviewed and ranked prior to selection by the ESA Program Chair, Paul Ringold, and INTECOL Program Chair, Rebecca Sharitz.

The Rangeland Section typically submits a proposal for a symposium, so the membership should be considering potential topics that would fit with the theme at the Montreal meeting. Multiple topics can be proposed but the Section can only sponsor one symposium.

Sam Fuhlendorf, Chair
Rangeland Section

Back to Table of Contents

SOIL ECOLOGY SECTION

At the 2003 Savannah, Georgia meeting, we made a transition to new leadership. This election was conducted by e-mail, since we anticipated a low turnout of Section members at this Annual Meeting. This change from our usual ballot at the business meeting was successful in that more votes were cast. The elections were close, reflecting the strength of all candidates.

Elected officers are:

• Chair, Julie Whitbeck (Biology, University of New Orleans)
  
• Vice Chair, Deb Neher (Earth, Ecology, Environment, University of Toledo)
  
• Secretary, Serita Frey (Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire)

Many thanks to our outgoing Section officers, Jayne Belnap (Chair), Jim Baxter (Vice Chair), and Sina Adl (Secretary) for their work over the past few years.

2004 Annual Meeting Symposium

We are glad that one of the symposium proposal ideas that arose from discussion during our 2003 Section meeting, and which we endorsed (along with the Urban Ecosystem Ecology Section), was selected for the 2004 Annual Meeting. The symposium is “Digging Deeper or Scratching the Surface? Exploring Ecological Theories in Urban Soils,” and has been organized by Mitch Pavao-Zukerman and Loren Byrne.

Two other symposium proposal ideas were hatched during our 2003 Section discussion, and we plan to revisit these as we develop proposals for the 2005 meeting in Montreal.

Student presentation competition/evaluation

Eight students competed for the ESA Soil Ecology Section’s student presentation award at the 2003 Annual Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. The high overall quality of these presentations is one indication of the valuable contributions contemporary students are making to soil ecology, and to ecology in general. A couple of noticeable trends are a shift toward evaluating ecological paradigms in the context of soil habitats, soil organisms, and soil processes, and a surge of studies in human-managed ecosystems. Congratulations to Evan Preisser, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, who won the Soil Section student presentation award for his talk, “Climate affects predator control of herbivore outbreaks.”

Many thanks to the 11 Soil Section members who generously participated in evaluating student presentations! We greatly appreciate your service and solicit your suggestions for improving the evaluation process in future years. We also seek to increase student participation in this competition, or to initiate alternative efforts that will promote student research in soil ecology and reward them for their achievements.

We are still struggling with low student awareness of the Soil Ecology Section award, and we discussed how to remedy this once again at our Section meeting. Suggestions included placing Section awards on the registration form, or scanning abstracts for possible student talks. Faculty are encouraged to remind their students to submit their presentation for judging.

Soil Ecology Section web site

Gary Rachel ‹gcrachel@uga.edu› developed a prototype web site for the Section over the winter; it is accessible at ‹http://www.esa.org/soilecology/index.htm› In addition to the home page and information on Section governance, the site contains notices of upcoming meetings of interest, blurbs on past Section student awards, and funding sources. Additional material to be added includes links to useful web sites of interest to soil ecologists, new publications by Section members, and a discussion forum. Many thanks to Gary for this work.

What can the Soil Ecology Section do for you? enterprise

We are soliciting feedback from Section members to learn how we can better serve member interests and needs throughout the year, as well as at Annual Meetings. This will be a focus of discussion at our 2004 Section meeting.

Section finances

June 2003 balance = $1100.68
August 2003 Annual Meeting expenditures = $850 ($250 for student award, $600 for mixer)
Member dues (estimated at $1090)
Balance, 31 March 2004 balance = $1340.68
August 2004 Annual Meeting expenditures (anticipated) = $607.41 ($250 for Student Award, $357.41 for mixer)

This year’s Section meeting follows our mixer, which begins at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, 4 August.

Julie Whitebeck, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

STATISTICAL ECOLOGY SECTION

The Statistical Ecology Section seeks to encourage research in statistical theory and methodology applied to ecological problems; to sponsor forums for presentation of advances in statistical ecology; and to facilitate communication between the disciplines of statistics and ecology so as to enhance statistical design and analysis in ecological research.

At the 2003 Annual Meeting the Section sponsored a symposium jointly with the ISEM–North American Chapter: “Structural Equations, Path Analysis, and Other Causal Models.” The symposium was organized by Sam Scheiner and included seven talks across a range of topics in ecology and evolutionary biology. The session was well attended.

As a follow-up to that symposium, at the 2004 Annual Meeting the Section is sponsoring a workshop on “An Overview of Structural Equation Modeling and Path Analysis.” The workshop is being organized by Jim Grace.

The Section gives an award for best oral presentation by a student, the E. C. Pielou Award. The award consists of a cash prize of $200 plus a book by Dr. Pielou. The winner at the 2003 meeting was Katia V. Koelle for her paper, “Disentangling the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic factors in nonlinear disease dynamics.” Ms. Koelle is currently a graduate student at the University of Michigan; her advisor is Mercedes Pascual.

Samuel Scheiner, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

STUDENT SECTION

The Student Section was formed in 2000 with three key goals:

1) To facilitate communications among all student members of ESA.

2) To enhance interactions between students and the Society as a whole.
3) To provide a more formal way for students to communicate their needs to the Society.

The Section’s primary activities are focused around the Annual Meeting, although we have developed more of a “year-round” presence through assisting in regional student ecology conferences (SEEC, MEEC, NEEC).

Annual Meeting activities

Careers in Ecology Workshop: The “Careers in Ecology” Workshop has been an annual event cosponsored with the Education Section and ESA Headquarters since 2000. The session includes a panel of ecologists from academia, consulting, education, government, industry, and other fields describing work in their respective fields. The 2003 Careers Workshop was well attended, with >200 participants. In 2004, the workshop has shifted a bit; we are sponsoring a panel entitled, “How to Succeed in Ecology: Advice From Current and Aspiring Eminent Ecologists.” The panel, chiefly organized by Alan Wilson, Liz Harp, and Deron Burkepile, will feature a number of top ecologists discussing their career paths.

Student lounge: The student lounge has become a centerpiece of the Annual Meeting, providing students with a place to meet and relax, and engage in informal discussions. In 2004, the lounge will also serve as a meeting place for SEEDS students and potential mentors.

Breakfast with the Board: The Breakfast with the Board at each meeting provides an opportunity for students to visit with the Governing Board of ESA. These meetings are a great chance for students to be heard in their views on the Annual Meeting, and also to visit with eminent ecologists.

Student Mixer and Section Meeting: The mixer is an informal chance to meet students from around the country in a very informal setting. The Section meeting is a chance to conduct business, select leadership, and lay out plans for the coming year.

Symposium: The Section has successfully endorsed a student-organized symposium for this meeting, entitled: “Disease Ecology and Declining Populations: Analyzing and Predicting Disease in Sensitive Populations,” principally organized by Liz Harp.

Web site: The Student Section has continued to maintain its web site, ‹http://www.esa.org/students/›

Regional student meetings

There are more regional student meetings, and the ESA Student Section is trying to become more involved in those meetings. These include the ongoing MEEC (Midwestern Ecology and Evolution Conference), NEEC (Northeastern Ecology and Evolution Conference), and the newly organized (by Section secretary Alan Wilson) SEEC (Southeastern Ecology and Evolution Conference).

Brochure

To help promote student membership in the Section (in spite of record student participation in Annual Meetings, relatively few join the Section and even fewer participate), the Section is developing a membership and outreach brochure for distribution at this Annual Meeting and in subsequent conferences.

Future goals

Although the Section has grown considerably in membership and activity since its inception in 2000, there are a number of opportunities to expand our work. We hope to continue the activities of the Annual Meeting. We are also working with students to set up regional meetings and symposia for ecology students and post-docs to present their research and interact in a more informal setting.

Jeffrey Lake, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE SECTION

The Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section of ESA has experienced a good year in the development of our new Section. Section programs have been well attended and lively sessions. We have received strong feedback that the presence of the TEK Section within the ESA organization has had a positive influence on diversifying the participation in ESA. A number of meeting participants from a wide array of ecological fields, including tribal colleges, have commented that the existence of the TEK Section has encouraged them to join ESA and contribute their energies to our shared mission. We feel that there is a good synergy with the successful activities of the SEEDS program, which has brought new faces and interests to the ESA meetings, who then find that the TEK Section engages their interest. We are looking forward to continuing building our membership and continuing to sponsor thought-provoking programs.

Notable activities for the year include:

Election of Section Officers

TEK Section officers were officially elected by the membership. They are:

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Chair rkimmer@esf.edu
  
• Jesse Ford, Vice-Chair Jesse.Ford@oregonstate.edu
  
• Sophi Beym, Secretary Sophi.beym@asu.edu
  
• Mark Fulton, webmaster MFulton@bemidjistate.edu

Annual meeting activities in Savannah

• Sponsored “Sense of Place” session which attracted a standing-room-only crowd to listen to native leaders from the Southeast, including Chief Thomas Bearheart of the Perdido Bay tribe of Creek and Cherokee environmental writer Marilou Awiakta.
• TEK contributed papers session with 8 presenters.
• TEK Business meeting and brown bag lunch

Symposium proposal submitted: A committee put considerable time and energy into creating a symposium proposal for the Portland meeting, based on the topic chosen at last years TEK Section meeting: “Ethical Practice and Intellectual Property Rights.” The competition for the few symposium slots available was intense. Our proposal made it through the first cut, but unfortunately was not selected. Plans are underway for a proposal for next year’s meeting in Montreal, to build upon the excellent TEK work of our Canadian colleagues.

TEK will have a significant presence at the Portland meeting including:

1) Opening Ceremonies with members of the Chinook community

2) Special “Sense of Place” session on Monday afternoon. The Program description appears below.

Sense of Place Special Session: “A Sense of Place: Indigenous Homelands of the Pacific Northwest”: The 2004 ESA meeting convenes within the ancestral homelands of Oregon’s first inhabitants. Most of us are strangers to this place. To indigenous people, a sense of place goes beyond natural history to encompass a biocultural landscape rich in story and meaning. This very special session opens our meetings with a welcome by representatives of the indigenous people of the region. Representatives of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest have been invited to provide an introduction to a sense of place through a Native American perspective. Drawing on diverse experiences with Oregon’s rivers, forests, mountains and coast speakers will share their multifaceted understanding of these ecosystems, and traditional land management practices. Presenters incorporate traditional ecological knowledge as a foundation for addressing traditional land management practices and current ecological pressures. This session is sponsored by the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section.

Evening session (Monday): “Columbia River Natives Encounter Lewis and Clark”: Two-hour discussion/slide show/basketry as a medium for discussion of environment and culture with Pat
Courtney Gold. The event is described below.

“Columbia River natives encounter Lewis and Clark”: This evening session will feature Pat Courtney Gold (Wasco), a lineal descendent of one of the tribes that hosted the Corps of Discovery, and a Lewis and Clark scholar. She begins from the observation that Native peoples occupied the regions traveled by Lewis and Clark for millennia, living with and from indigenous plant and animal communities whose characteristics and interrelationships were well understood. Cultural patterns and perhaps the very structure of languages were formed in response to diverse local environments. The arrival of the Corps of Discovery with their foreign ways and unusual perspectives was of variable significance among the different cultures, and in many places was no more remarkable than contact with any other tribe.

Pat holds a B.A. in mathematics and spent 5 years engaged in mathematical modeling of air and watersheds before turning her attention back to baskets, basketry, and the ecology of plants important to basketry. In the Native way, a basket weaver must understand the plants, their habits and habitats, and their relationship to rivers, including (in the Northwest) salmon as an important item of trade as well as a source of sustenance. Further, the weaver must have a clear understanding of how all of these factors intertwine with culture. In recent years, Pat has lectured widely on Wasco basketry as a material expression of Wasco heritage and culture, and how pollution problems have impacted native basketry plants and Native basket weavers. This work culminated in a 2003 publication on the subject published by Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Most recently, Pat has reflected in some depth and detail on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, augmenting her understanding as a lineal descendant of one of the host tribes with a close reading of the original journals of Lewis and Clark. This year she organized a symposium series at Maryhill Museum of Art (Goldendale, Washington) entitled “Reflecting on Lewis and Clark: Contemporary American Indian Viewpoints,” which featured artists and speakers from numerous tribes.
This 2-hour evening event will be evenly balanced between Pat’s remarks illustrated by slides and artifacts (including examples from her own basketry collection), and audience discussion.

1) “An evening with Pacific Northwest Writers.” Native writer Craig Leslie has been chosen as one of the honored participants.

2) The Fire Symposium will include a presentation by Dennis Martinez incorporating indigenous views on burning and traditional resource management.

3) Field Trips. Proposed field trips include a preconference trip to the Warm Springs Reserve to observe a restoration project using traditional burning to restore the red huckleberry, a culturally significant plant. Another preconference trip, “The Columbia River Gorge then and now,” will include perspectives of Wasco/Chinook peoples. A postconference trip on fire is planned to include Dennis Martinez on traditional burning.

4) TEK Section meeting and luncheon.

5) There will also be an array of student-centered SEEDS activities, including students and mentors from Tribal Colleges.

6) With support from the U.S. Forest Service and leadership of Kheryn Klubnikan, the TEK Section will host a round table listening session to gather ideas concerning appropriate processes for including native peoples in the research plan for the Forest Service “White waters to blue waters” watershed management plan for the Mississippi River basin. A reception, funded by the Oregon Nature Conservancy, will follow the round table.

Strategic planning grant received

The TEK Section applied for and was successful in receiving a grant from the Ecological Society to engage in the process of long-range strategic planning for the future of the Section. A planning retreat will be held in advance of the ESA meeting, 30–31 July 2004, to more clearly define our shared goals and strategies for implementation. Eight Section members will participate. We appreciate the support for this opportunity to envision the activities on which we collectively want to spend our energies, including symposium planning, education, advocacy, outreach, workshops, and publications.

Robin Kimmerer, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

URBAN ECOSYSTEM ECOLOGY SECTION

The Urban Ecosystem Ecology Section is now a year old, with 176 members. A meeting was held last year, but many of the ideas discussed involving Section business had to be deferred until the official Section membership and budget could be determined and given time to accrue. We will meet in Portland this year to elect officers, determine the content for a web site, and discuss ideas for Section initiatives. Together with the Soil Ecology Section we sponsored a successful symposium proposal, “Digging Deeper or Scratching the Surface? Exploring Ecological Theories in Urban Soils,” for the 2004 meeting of ESA in Portland. We congratulate and thank Mitch Pavao-Zuckerman (University of Arizona) and Loren Byrne (Pennsylvania State University) who organized this symposium.

Margaret M. Carreiro, Chair

VEGETATION SECTION

Business Meeting, Annual Meeting, Savannah, Georgia

The annual Business Meeting of the Vegetation Section was held Monday, 4 August 2003 during the 88th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Savannah, Georgia. At that meeting Scott Collins became Past Section Chair and Beverly Collins became Section Chair. Approximately 60 individuals attended the business meeting and mixer.

Issues before the Section: One issue was presented for discussion at the business meeting. This issue was whether or not the Section should change its bylaws to allow the Chair and Chair-Elect to serve for two years, rather than one year. To change the term of service would require a change in the Section Bylaws, which would require a vote of the Section membership. Discussion centered around procedures for voting on a change in Section Bylaws. It was decided that, in accordance with the Bylaws, the proposed change would be presented to the membership at least 60 days before the 2004 business meeting, and the issue would be voted on during the annual Business Meeting in Portland. The proposed change is presented briefly below.

Term limits: It was proposed that the term of Chair-Elect and Chair be changed from one year to two years. The purposes of changing the term of service of the Chair and Chair-Elect would be to (1) provide additional continuity for Section business from one year to the next, (2) provide the Chair and Chair-Elect an extended opportunity to discuss and potentially enact changes, if voted on by the members, (3) afford a longer period of time to promote Section activities, and (4) provide greater continuity of representation on the ESA Council. Some sections (e.g., Aquatic Section, Applied Ecology Section) currently elect officers for 2-year terms.

The Ton Damman Award in Vegetation Science

Thanks to the kindness and generosity of Loretta Johnson, an ecologist at Kansas State University, in 2003 the Vegetation Section of ESA announced the Ton Damman Award in Vegetation Science. This award will be given to a graduate student or very recent postgraduate scientist for the best oral presentation in Vegetation Science at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Students competing for the Damman Award must meet all the criteria for ESA’s Buell Award. The Ton Damman Award recognizes the lifetime dedication of Ton Damman to the advancement of Vegetation Science. A candidate for this award need not be a member of the Vegetation Section, but does need to be senior author of the abstract and give the oral presentation at the Annual Meeting. Rachel Collins was the first recipient of the Ton Damman award for her presentation, co-authored by Walter Carson, “Do succession models predict the right pattern for the wrong reason: shade vs. herbivore tolerance?” at the ESA Meeting in Savannah. The award will be presented to her at the annual business meeting in Portland.

Vegetation Section web site

A web site ‹http://www.uga.edu/srel/esavegsec/› has been established for the Vegetation Section. The web site has information on the Section’s mission, news and announcements, and activities. Students interested in the Ton Damman award can find information on eligibility requirements and application procedures.

Beverly Collins, Chair

Back to Table of Contents
VI. REPORTS OF CHAPTERS

MEXICO CHAPTER

The Mexico Chapter of the Ecological Society of America was established in April 2003. It held its first meeting on 6 August 2003. At this first gathering, the members agreed to pursue several activities before the 2004 Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Advances on these activities are described below.

An ESA Symposium for the 2004 Annual Meeting

Marisa Martínez, Patricia Balvanera, and Robert Manson organized the symposium entitled “The Evolution of Ecology in Mexico: Research Challenges and the Role of Mexico–U.S. Collaboration” for the 2004 Annual Meeting. The Mexico Chapter sponsors this symposium. This symposium will cover the history of ecology as a science in Mexico, research collaboration in projects located both in the United States and Mexico, as well as future environmental challenges of ecology in Mexico. The organizers have confirmed all the speakers. The symposium will take place on Wednesday, 4 August, from 1:30 to 5:00 pm. The symposium will include some of the most prominent ecologists of Mexico (e.g., Jose Sarukhán, Gonzalo Halffter), who will be presenting their views on the history of Mexican ecology as well as their perspectives regarding some of the promising future directions of this field, with a particular emphasis on the possibilities for cooperation between Mexican and U.S. ecologists. In addition, the Chapter plans the symposium as an introduction to future activities. We take this opportunity to thank The Instituto de Ecología AC and its director, Daniel Piñero, for providing support for this symposium by covering the registration expenses of all the Mexican speakers. Member Marisa Martínez is to be thanked also for taking this initiative and making it happen.

Development of the directory of ESA´s Mexican Chapter

The Chapter Secretary, Renée González-Montagut, prepared a questionnaire for all members, which included their contact data and research interests. Members were also asked to recommend new people to be incorporated in the Chapter. These persons were contacted and asked to join our Chapter. The directory is posted in the Mexico Chapter web page and currently includes 49 members.

Development of a web site

Erick De la Barrera is the webmaster for the Chapter. The web page includes the minutes of the first meeting, the directory of the members, and the description of the symposium sponsored by the Chapter. The Mexico Chapter web page includes links to the ESA web site and other sites. It also posts job opportunities in Mexico. Erick, who has volunteered to continue doing this job, regularly updates the web site.

A cosponsored symposium (ESA Mexican Chapter–Botanical Society of Mexico)

In this year’s annual meeting of the Botanical Society of Mexico (18–22 October, in Oaxaca) one symposium, organized by Miguel Martínez-Ramos, is presented as a cosponsored activity of the Mexican Chapter. The symposium on tropical ecology will include a substantial participation of prominent ecologists from both Mexico and the U.S. All of the participants are members of both the Botanical Society and ESA. We hope to use this opportunity to promote the Chapter; we expect this symposium will be instrumental in triggering similar joint activities between both communities of ecologists. It is worth noting that there is not an ecological society in Mexico, and the Mexican Botanical Society is the best representation of Mexican (though largely botanically oriented) ecologists.

A thematic ESA Mexican Chapter Symposium in Mexico

Rodolfo Dirzo proposed to think about a possible theme for a symposium, which could attract a group of ecologists to meet next year in Mexico. Such a symposium would not require considerable funding if institutional support is available. It would be a good experience to eventually prepare for a future ESA Annual Meeting in Mexico. Themes and venue are being discussed, but the symposium is planned to take place in one of UNAM´s field stations; this should make it attractive for participants and also very inexpensive if a discount on station fees can be obtained. Rodolfo Dirzo has approached the directors of both stations to work out the possibilities for this.

A PowerPoint presentation on ESA and its Mexican Chapter

A PP presentation is being developed, in Spanish, for members to use for whatever opportunities they have, in order to promote ESA and its Mexican Chapter. It is planned to have it ready for use during the Mexican Botanical Congress in October.

Rodolfo Dirzo and Renee González

Back to Table of Contents

ROCKY MOUNTAIN CHAPTER

The Rocky Mountain Chapter is still working to revitalize and diversify our activities. The objectives of the Chapter are to encourage education and research and to sponsor meetings for the communication of ecological education and research activities of special interest to ecologists in the Rocky Mountain Region of North America. To that end, the Chapter continues to sponsor the Annual Front Range Student Ecology Symposium at Colorado State University. The 10th symposium was held on 6–7 April 2004, and our chapter provided $500 of support. A full description and schedule of events can be found at: ‹http://lamar.colostate.edu/~ecosym/_Home.html›

This year, five colleges and universities from Colorado and four Colorado high schools produced 31 oral presentations and 41 posters. Student, faculty, and Federal scientist members of the ESA participate each year, and are thus on hand to “recruit” and to learn from our next generation of leaders in the field. Geneva Chong (Vice-Chair, 2001–2003) agreed to serve as Chair (2003–2005) and Thomas J. Stohlgren (Chair, 2001–2003) will serve as the Vice-Chair (2003–2005). The positions of Secretary, currently Anna Schoettle (2002–2004), and webmaster, currently Richard L. Boyce, (2002–2003), need to be filled this year. We will have our annual meeting on Thursday, 5 August 2004 from 7:00 to 8:00 am in the Oregon Convention Center. Continental breakfast will be served, and we will continue to explore our revitalization efforts and opportunities.

For more information on the chapter: ‹http://www.nku.edu/%7Eboycer/rmesa.html›

Geneva Chong, Chair

SOUTHEASTERN CHAPTER

The Chapter held an informal brown bag lunch meeting at the ESA Annual Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Discussion at the lunch meeting focused on the proposal to establish a student poster award for the best ecological poster presented at the Association of Southeastern Biologists (ASB) meeting. There was also discussion of potential symposia at the 2004 ASB and ESA meetings. The symposium: “Ecological Forces and Land Management Challenges for the Southeastern Landscape,” organized by Diane De Steven and Beverly Collins and endorsed by the Chapter, was presented at the Savannah ESA meeting.

The Southeastern Chapter held its annual meeting with the ASB in April in Memphis, Tennessee. The Chapter cosponsored a symposium organized by Pat Parr and Jack Ranney: “Invasive Plant Awareness and Research: Priority Status.” The symposium was cosponsored by the Tennessee Exotic Pest Plant Council. The Chapter’s Odum Award for 2004 was presented to two recipients: Nicole M. Hughes of Appalachian State University for her paper, “Functional role of anthocyanins in high light winter leaves of the evergreen herb, Galax urceolata” co-authored with Howard S. Neufeld; and Christopher Winne of Savannah River Ecology Laboratory for his paper, “Daily activity patterns of whiptail lizards (Squamata: Teiidae: Aspidoscelis): a proximate response to environmental conditions or an endogenous rhythm?” co-authored with Michael Keck.

The Chapter held its annual business meeting in April. Elections were held for the Chair and Secretary/Treasurer (2004–2006). Candidates were James Luken (Coastal Carolina University) for Chair and Nicole Turrill Welch (Middle Tennessee State University) for Secretary/Treasurer; both were elected and will assume office in August. We voted on and passed a bylaws amendment to establish the Quarterman-Keever award for the best student poster in ecology presented at the annual ASB meeting. The award honors Elsie Quarterman and Catherine Keever for their contributions to ecology. Vice Chair Joan Walker will be leading the fund-raising effort for this new award.

The Chapter contributed $200 to the First Annual Southeastern Ecology and Evolution Conference in March at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Chapter newsletters have been published on the Chapter’s web site ‹http://www.auburn.edu/seesa/› and in the ESA Bulletin. Announcements, meeting minutes, notes, and other information for the Chapter have been added periodically to our web site.

Paul A. Schmalzer, Chair

Back to Table of Contents

The following article was submitted by Nancy Stamp, Professor of Biology at Binghamton University, SUNY. Although every ecology course mentions plant–animal interactions, I think you will find Professor Stamp’s information especially timely and informative. Warning: Consumption of information in this article may result in students becoming excited about plants!

Many people have some fundamental misconceptions about plants and herbivores. This is not surprising given that for most people their experience is limited to eating domesticated plants, which are far more edible than the wild relatives (i.e., cultivars are bred for “good” taste and digestibility, and so have far lower levels of toxins [Johns 1996, Schoonhoven et al. 1998]). Here is a typical example of a misconception about plants and herbivores. During a supper conversation with five renowned faculty in languages and culture from universities in North America, I discovered that none of these scholars realized that spices reflected plants defending themselves against herbivores. They thought spices were just substances that plants produced, perhaps with a function or not. The idea that plants might defend themselves was surprising to them. After all, we humans like spices in our food and certainly aren’t deterred by spices. And that is why this is a misconception; people’s personal experience runs counter to the concept, and so they tend to retain the misconception.

The term “misconception” in science education refers to people thinking that they understand a concept, i.e., they have a prior, intuitive, or alternative explanation for a phenomenon, but their understanding is fundamentally incorrect (CUSE 1997, D’Avanzo 2003). Many studies have been done with people of all ages to assess their misconceptions about one of the sciences— physics, chemistry, evolution, physiology (e.g., Peters 1982, Lawson and Thompson 1988, Zoller 1990, Wandersee et al. 1994), but there are relatively few studies that address misconceptions in ecology (but see Munson 1994).

Here is an example of why a misconception about plant defenses can pose a problem.

Because of the active chemicals present, plant material is often used in “dietary supplements” and “health remedies” as well as for “spices.” This has become big business. For instance, the American Spice Trade Association reported a 20% increase in use of spices in the 1990s (Harris 2001). A survey of Canadians reported that two-thirds thought herbal supplements could be as effective as prescriptive drugs in treating health problems (PRN 1999). But used indiscriminately, in large amounts or in combination with other chemicals, these plant chemicals can be harmful. An example is ephedra (common name for a marketed material from Ephedra sinica). It contains natural ephedrine alkaloids and is used for weight loss and enhancement of sports performance (USFDA 2003a). It affects the respiratory and circulatory systems, and in combination with stimulants, such as caffeine, its effects are enhanced and have been linked to various health problems and even death (Dharmananda 2000, USFDA 2003a). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued warnings about use of ephedra. But manufacturers do not have to prove product safety of plant material prior to marketing; the government has to prove its case of “significant risk of illness” once the product is on the market and that may take years (USFDA 2003a).

Another example is the problem of people taking certain oral medications (e.g., cholesterol-lowering agents and calcium-channel blockers used for circulatory problems) with grapefruit juice, which has furanocoumarins that bind with cytochrome P450 enyzmes in the small intestine, so the dosage absorbed into the blood stream is actually too high (i.e., the prescribed dosage takes into account that some will be bound by the enzyme and so not be active) (Greenblatt et al. 2001). Other examples of common herbal supplements that have risks when taken with prescriptive drugs are ginkgo biloba and St. John’s-wort, again because plant defensive chemicals can enhance or interfere with medication (USFDA 2003b). As use of medical drugs has increased greatly in the last 25 years, especially among the elderly in developed countries, so has use of herbal remedies along with the other drugs, which increases the concern about herb and drug interactions (Dharmananda 2000, USFDA 2003b).

Concept of plant defenses counterintuitive for modern humans

While hunter–gatherer societies and humans in early civilization knew of and used plants as medicines, modern humans in “developed” countries live in a world of synthetic and packaged medicines and so are largely ignorant of those uses. Therefore, the concept of plant defenses is not intuitive for modern-day humans. If people understood that plants have evolved toxins in the process of protecting themselves, they might have more appreciation for the potential danger of imbibing these substances, especially in large quantities or with other substances.

Curiously, while books on food history discuss at length the use and culture of spices, they typically say little or nothing about why plants have toxins, the key ingredients of spices (e.g., see McGee 1984:212, Tannahill 1988, Fernandez-Armesto 2002). Such books tend to give relatively few examples of plant chemicals as toxins, or they present examples in the context of special cases, so people are likely to get the impression that relatively few plants have chemical toxins. Even in books about peppers (Capsicum), which are well known for their “hot” taste, mention of plant defense is slight and so embedded that a reader may easily miss that point (e.g., Naj 1992:48 and 223). Books about herbal medicines also tend not to indicate why plants would have such chemically active substances (e.g., Tierra 1998).

The domestication of plants used by humans required some adjustment to plant chemical and/or morphological defenses (e.g., pickling or salt-curing olives; breeding tomato fruits for palatability; pounding, soaking, and cooking manioc), or the amounts imbibed were small enough simply to enhance taste (e.g., spices, coffee, tea, cocoa) or provide medication (e.g., chamomile, Echinacea, ginkgo). “The discovery that these naturally toxic plants [e.g., wild potato, taro and cassava] could be worth cultivating and transforming into food is another of the miracles of “primitive” agronomy, and another of the unsolved mysteries of the early history of farming.” (Fernandez-Armesto 2002:100).

Cooking was a key component in this transformation because it destroys the poisons in some plants, but how early humans discovered that is unknown (Leopold and Ardrey 1972). What is known is that hearths (and so presumably cooking) were not common until about 40,000 years ago. The invention of cooking is a cultural phenomenon that facilitated adaptive radiation ecologically of humans around the Earth. It also set the stage for the invention of agriculture (e.g., the nutritive value of grain becomes available by cooking) (Fernandez-Armesto 2002).

Survey indicated misconceptions

A survey of 227 college students at Binghamton University supported the idea that people tend to have misconceptions about plant defenses. While 35% of the students surveyed said caffeine in coffee is a poison that protects coffee plants from many animals that would eat them, 29% said caffeine was present because the plants needed it for their own metabolism, 20% thought it was a waste product of plant metabolism with no function, and 15% thought it was due to plant-breeding by humans for that trait (and not recognizing that the trait has to exist before there can be selection for it). In other words, two-thirds of the students are missing the point that caffeine is a poison that has a role in protecting plants from herbivores, and they also apparently don’t have a basic understanding of plant metabolism or plant-breeding.

Related to the issue of plant defense are these concepts: (1) plants can defend themselves against herbivores, (2) aside from the toxic plant defenses, herbivores also contend with poorer quality food than do carnivores, (3) reflecting the diversity of plant defenses, insect herbivores specialize on a small set of plant species, and (4) plants have internal mechanisms to fight specific pathogens. The survey of college students indicated that only 32% thought plants could defend themselves. Many people think plants are at the mercy of herbivores. This is not surprising since most people only eat plant matter that is relatively high in protein (e.g., grains) and digestibility (e.g., fruits, seeds, young leaves). Only 11% of the students realized that animals eating leaves contend with poorer quality food than animals eating animal tissue. Plant tissue has relatively low concentration of nitrogen and high concentration of indigestible material (Schoonhoven et al. 1998). This concept is central to understanding the low ecological efficiency in transfer of energy across trophic levels, and thus, energy flow in ecosystems and how that contributes to plant–herbivore interactions. The student survey indicated that 52% did not realize that most insect herbivores specialize on a relatively small set of plant species. Many people think that the typical insect herbivore is like the gypsy moth; that is, they think that when the population builds up, the insects eat a lot of whatever plants are available (but even gypsy moths do not eat whatever plants are available). The student survey showed that 40% thought that plants cannot respond defensively to specific pathogens. Many people think that only animals (or mammals) can respond specifically to pathogens. Plants do not have an immune system with circulating cells, but the signal (gene products) and receptor mechanisms in the inducible defensive system of plants are as complex and sophisticated as the signaling mechanisms in animals (Ryan and Jagendorf 1995). Furthermore, the structural and functional similarities between plant and mammalian defense responses suggest that these responses may be inherited from a common ancestor (Baker et al. 1997).

How to address misconceptions about the plant–herbivore interaction

The research on misconceptions shows that people tend to retain their misconceptions, unless mentally forced to reject them and reconstruct the current or modern conceptual views (Lawson and Thompson 1988, Novak and Musonda 1993, Chinn and Brewer 1998). Textbooks and traditional lecture-hall classes seldom provide the mental head-on collision necessary to force people to rethink their views (Smith et al. 1993). For example, studies show that students tend to memorize information sufficiently to pass tests, but still retain their misconceptions (Smith et al. 1993).

After identifying misconceptions, the next step is to challenge them via engaging and/or “discrepant” events (Nussbaum and Novak 1982). It is somewhat easier to challenge misconceptions with laboratory exercises and small group discussions (Posner et al. 1982, Smith et al. 1993), so how can we address misconceptions in large-enrollment courses and via textbooks? An obvious “hook” is students’ interest in human health (e.g., diet, foods, disease, medicine). Presently, ecology textbooks say little about plant defenses as a source of drugs and spices. A survey that I did of ecology textbooks published between 1993 and 2003 (n = 27, which included re-editions) showed that only 59% mentioned that these chemicals can be a source of drugs and 22% mentioned the relationship between plant chemical defenses and spices. Furthermore, the textbook statements did little to engage students and nothing to help students understand that the diversity of plants is not simply a morphological phenomenon in response to abiotic conditions, but also a chemical phenomenon largely due to selective pressure of herbivores and pathogens.

Here is a simple example of “engagement.” Of all illustrations that I show in my ecology course, “spiders on drugs” is the one that students invariably remember after the course. It shows the results of a NASA study contrasting the web of a spider without caffeine (a normal web) vs. an erratically constructed web with lots of gaping holes made by a spider given caffeine (not that spiders eat coffee plants, but they might eat insects eating coffee plants) (Noever et al. 1995). It gets across the idea that caffeine is actually a poison that can have detrimental effects on other, especially small, animals. It just so happens that we humans are rather tolerant physiologically of caffeine (Hollingsworth et al. 2002), so students’ personal experience runs counter to this, and that is why this effect on spiders surprises them, and thus “engages” them to think about or rethink what such substances are doing in plants.

Here is a more complex example, which uses story-telling to engage students (Wilson 2002), and it works best if questions are posed throughout. Since most wild plants contain secondary metabolites that make nutrients unavailable to herbivores, make the plant taste nasty, and/or make an animal sick, how did early humans discover ways to get around these plant defenses and begin the process of domestication of plants, in particular herbaceous plants? It has been well documented that both primates and some human societies deliberately eat dirt (geophagy) that contains no nutrients (Johns 1996). Adding clay (e.g., with a high level of kaolin, the active ingredient in the antidiarrheal Kaopectate), to plant matter containing toxins can result in the clay binding with the plant toxins (Vermeer and Ferrell 1985, Johns 1986). For instance, Native Americans in both South and North America added clay to wild potatoes (skin contains solanine, a glycoalkaloid) and in California to acorns (which contain tannins) (Johns 1996). Importantly, geophagy may be the first detoxification technique that humans used, since it has been reported for several species of primates (Johns 1996). Many other engaging “discrepant event” stories are available about the relationship of plant defenses, human diet, and the invention of agriculture. One study listed 216 plant species from 65 families for which detoxification techniques were used by humans to make the material palatable (Johns and Kubo 1988). Clearly detoxification of plant matter physically and/or genetically has played a very important role in the evolution and success of modern humans.

Such stories help students, especially in developed countries where most people depend on medicines dispensed as pills and have little experience with agriculture or gardening, to discover the intimate but contentious relationship that herbivores have with plants.

In summary, people often have misconceptions about plants and herbivores, in particular about plant defenses. That people have these misconceptions should be of concern to us. Much more effort needs to be put into identifying these misconceptions and directly challenging them in every mode of instruction, but especially in textbooks and large classes, because this is where we have the most contact with the public. “… it is not enough to teach scientific conceptions. Teachers must also “unteach” naïve misconceptions.” (Lawson and Thompson 1988:745).

Acknowledgments

I thank Jeff Bohner, Mike Armstrong, and Tracy Armstrong for comments on the manuscript, Andrew Telesca for surveying his sophomore astronomy class, and Ellen Simms for the opportunity to discuss some of these ideas at a Gordon Conference on Plant–Herbivore Interactions. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants DUE-0226897 and GK12-0086375.

Literature cited

Baker, B., P. Zambryski, B. Staskawicz, and S. P. Dinesh-Kumar. 1997. Signaling in plant–microbe interactions. Science 276:726–733.
Chinn, C. A., and W. F. Brewer. 1998. An empirical test of a taxonomy of responses to anomalous data in science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 35:623–654.
CUSE [Committee on Undergraduate Science Education—National Academy of Science–National Research Council–National Science Foundation] 1997. Science teaching reconsidered: a handbook. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
D’Avanzo, C. 2003. Application of research on learning to college teaching: ecological examples. BioScience 53:1121–1128.
Dharmananda, S. 2000. The interactions of herbs and drugs. Institute for Traditional Medicine. ‹http://www.itmonline.org/arts/herbdrug.htm›
Fernandez-Armesto, F. 2002. Near a thousand tables: a history of food. Free Press, New York, New York, USA.
Greenblatt, D. J., K. C. Patki, L. L. Von Moltke, and R. I. Shader. 2001. Drug interactions with grapefruit juice: an update. Journal of Clinical Psypharmocology 21:357–359.
Harris, M. 2001. Why consumers are buying organic spices. E/Environmental Magazine (8 May 2001) published by Earth Action Network. Article reprinted at ‹http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/spicesgood.cfm›
Hollingsworth, R. G., J. W. Armstrong, and E. Campbell. 2002. Caffeine as a repellent for slugs and snails. Nature 417:915–916.
Johns, T. 1986. Detoxification function of geophagy and domestication of the potato. Journal of Chemical Ecology 12:635–646.
Johns, T. 1996. The origins of human diet and medicine: chemical ecology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Johns, T., and I. Kubo. 1988. A survey of traditional methods employed for the detoxification of plant foods. Journal of Ethnobiology 8:81–129.
Lawson, A. E., and L. D. Thompson. 1988. Formal reasoning ability and misconceptions concerning genetics and natural selection. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 25:733–746.
Leopold, A. C., and R. Ardrey. 1972. Toxic substances in plants and the food habits of early man. Science 176:512–514.
McGee, H. 1984. On food and cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen. Collier Books, New York, New York, USA.
Munson, B. H. 1994. Ecological misconceptions. Journal of Environmental Education 25:30–34.
Naj, A. 1992. Peppers: a story of hot pursuits. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York, USA.
Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82
Novak, J., and D. Musonda. 1991. A twelve-year longitudinal study of science concept learning. American Education Research Journal 28:117–153.
Nussbaum, J., and S. Novick. 1982. A study of conceptual change in the classroom. National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting Paper. Cited on p. 113 in Smith, E. L., T. D. Blakeslee, and C. W. Anderson. 1993. Teaching strategies associated with conceptual change learning in science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 30:111–126.
Peters, P. 1982. Even honors students have conceptual difficulties with physics. American Journal of Physics 50:501–508.
Posner, G. J., K. A. Strike, P. W. Hewson, and W. A. Gertzog. 1982. Accommodation of a scientific conception: toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education 66:211–227.
PRN [PR Newswire] 1999. Survey of Canadians shows broad acceptance of herbal supplements and teas. Re-published by Herb Research Foundation ‹http://www.herbs.org/current/canadiansurvey.html›
Ryan, C., and A. Jagendorf. 1995. Self defense by plants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 92:4075.
Schoonhoven, L. M., T. Jermy, and J. J. A. van Loon. 1998. Insect–plant biology: from physiology to evolution. Chapman and Hall, London, UK.
Smith, E. L., T. D. Blakeslee, and C. W. Anderson. 1993. Teaching strategies associated with conceptual change learning in science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 30:111–126.
Tannahill, R. 1988. Food in history. Three Rivers Press, New York, New York, USA.
Tierra, M. 1998. The way of herbs. Pocket Books, New York, New York, USA.
USFDA (United States Food and Drug Administration). 2003a. Evidence on the safety and effectiveness of ephedra: implications for regulation. White paper on ephedra. FDA News ‹http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/ephedra/whitepaper.html›
USFDA (United States Food and Drug Administration). 2003b. Dietary supplements. ‹http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/ds-savv2.html›
Vermeer, D. E., and R. G. Ferrell. 1985. Nigerian geophagy clay: a traditional antidiarrheal pharmaceutical. Science 227:634–636.
Wandersee, J. H., J. J. Mintzes, and J. D. Novak. 1994. Research on alternative conceptions in science. Pages 177–210 in D. Gabel, editor. Handbook of research on science teaching and learning. MacMillan, New York.
Wilson, E. O. 2002. The power of story. American Educator 28 (spring):8–11.
Zoller, U. 1990. Students’ misunderstandings and misconceptions in college freshman chemistry (general and organic). Journal of Research in Science Teaching 27:1053–1065.

Nancy Stamp
Department of Biological Sciences
Binghamton University
State University of New York
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000