ESA Fellows Program

ESA designates as Fellows of the Society certain members who have made outstanding contributions to wide range of fields served by ESA. Such contributions include, but are not restricted to, those that advance or apply ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations, and the private sector.

Goals of the ESA Fellows Program

To honor ESA members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the discipline.
To help make outstanding ESA members more competitive for awards and honors when they are being compared with colleagues from other disciplines.
To support the advancement of ESA members to leadership positions in their own institutions and in the broader society.

The designation of an ESA member as a ESA Fellow is an honorific title, and all Fellows will be listed on the ESA website. No special duties or privileges are conferred with Fellowship. Fellows are elected for life and Fellowship can only be revoked in extraordinary cases by the ESA Governing Board upon recommendation from the Professional Ethics and Appeals Committee.

Eligibility Criteria

Any current regular member of ESA who has been a regular member of ESA for at least five years (not necessarily consecutive) is eligible to be nominated to be an ESA Fellow. For these purposes, a regular member is defined as a non-student, dues-paying member.
A nominee is expected to have been a member of the profession for at least fifteen years. In most cases, this will be interpreted to mean fifteen years from PhD.
Demonstrated excellence of contributions to one or several of the following areas: (1) research and discovery, (2) communication and outreach, education and pedagogy, (3) application of ecology to management and policy.
Members of the ESA Fellows Awards SubCommittee may not be nominated to be ESA Fellows while in office.
ESA Presidents and Vice Presidents will automatically become Fellows upon election, if they are not Fellows already.

Nomination Procedures

The nomination of an individual to be an ESA Fellow can be made by any three members of ESA except members of the Fellows Selection Committee (defined below).
The criteria and procedures for nominating ESA Fellows will be posted on the ESA website.

Nominations shall be submitted electronically and consist of:

A curriculum vitae of at most four pages. It is suggested that the vita include evidence of outstanding contributions as outlined under the eligibility criteria. One to three letters of recommendation which may come from anyone, including nominators and non-members.
A citation of at most 50 words proposed for use if the nominee is selected to be a Fellow.
No ESA member can nominate more than two individuals in a given year.

The Fellows Selection Committee (see below) will work to the best of its ability to elect the most deserving nominees. In making these decisions, the Committee will rely on the information in the nomination package and on the detailed insight about a nominee’s professional accomplishments that is provided by the letters of recommendation. It is important that the nomination package describes the nominee’s most significant contributions and their impact.

Nominations will be solicited annually, including explicit solicitation from each section and chapter, and must be received by the ESA office by the first Monday in December (except 2013 - nominations due February 1, 2013). New Fellows will be announced in the ESA Bulletin and will be recognized at the ESA Annual Meeting.

Any nomination that satisfies all requirements will remain active for three consecutive years.

Selection of Fellows

The ESA Fellows Program will be implemented by two committees, the ESA Awards Committee and the Fellows Selection Committee.

With regard to Fellows, the Awards Committee will have three duties:

To appoint the members of the Fellows Selection Committee.
To set the target number of Fellows to be selected in the current year in view of the guidelines below.
To address any difficulties that may arise in the implementation of the Fellows Program.

The Fellows Selection Committee will consist of six members serving staggered two-year terms. Only ESA Fellows who are also regular ESA members and who have not served on the Fellows Selection Committee in the preceding five years are eligible for appointment to the Committee. Each year, three new Committee members will be appointed by the Awards Committee from among those eligible, and the Awards Committee chair will designate one of the continuing committee members as chair.

The Awards Committee, when appointing the Fellows Selection Committee, and the Fellows Selection Committee, when evaluating nominees, will give careful attention to diversity in every possible sense.

The Fellows Selection Committee is charged to evaluate nominees and to recommend the selection of the ESA Fellows. The Fellows Selection Committee may not recommend more than the target number of Fellows, but may choose to recommend fewer Fellows if the nomination pool so warrants. The documentation submitted with a nomination is the basis for a selection decision. The recommended list will be presented to the ESA Governing Board for final approval.

The Fellows Program will develop in three stages: the start-up, the transitional, and the steady state.

Program Start-up Period: In order to speed the development of the ESA Fellows Program and to insure sufficient fellows for the Fellows Selection Committee, Fellowship will be conferred on a number of ESA members upon program inception. The initial Fellows will be selected from among those ESA members whose previous levels of recognition place them clearly among the members intended to be recognized by the program.

The list of Fellows so appointed will be published by ESA at the inception of the program. Any ESA member who believes that, based on the start-up procedures, there is an omission from this list should so inform ESA within three months of publication of the list. The Awards Committee will investigate all such cases and provide a decision as to whether to confer Fellowship under the start-up procedures. The decision of the Awards Committee is final. However, a negative decision will in no way impact a possible future nomination for Fellowship.

Program Transitional Period: The program transitional period will run from the end of the first year of the Fellows Program until the end of the tenth year. At the end of the first year, the target number of new Fellows to be appointed will be 0.45% of the number of regular ESA members. At the end of the second year, the target number of new Fellows to be appointed will be 0.435%. The target number will continue to decrease by 0.015% per year throughout the transitional period, until reaching 0.315% at the end of the tenth year of the program.

Program Steady State: Each year, after the transitional period, the target number of new Fellows to be selected that year will be set by the Awards Committee at an anticipated level of 0.30% of the number of regular ESA members.

Revisions to Fellows Program