ESA Aquatic Ecology Section
SECTION NEWS
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The 2006 Aquatic Section mixer/business meeting in Memphis will be Monday evening (Aug 7) from 6:30-8:00. Free food! Don't miss it! • Daniel Schindler and Maria Gonzalez were elected as Vice-Chair and Secretary in 2005, respectively. Daniel will become the Chair in 2008. • An Aquatic Section thank you to departing officers, Chris Luecke (Chair) and Kathy Cottingham (Secretary)! • James Vonesh was the recipient of the 2005 Frost Award. • Wendy Palen was the recipient of the 2004 Best Talk Award. • Allison Longmuir and Mike Allen received Travel Awards ($200 each) to attend the 2005 conference in Montreal . • NEON announcement- call for comments from aquatic ecologists. • Business meeting and mixer in Memphis . • Request for judges. • Upcoming awards (Frost Award, Best Talk, Student Travel). Frost Award Recipient. Thomas M. Frost was the director of the University of Wisconsin Trout Lake Station from 1981 until his death in 2000. His colleagues remember him as a dedicated and creative scientist who brought a gentle, caring humanity to our endeavors. To honor Tom's commitments to aquatic ecology and to graduate student education, the Aquatic Ecology Section initiated the Thomas M. Frost Award for Excellence in Graduate Research in 2002. This award recognizes an outstanding paper resulting from research done as a graduate student. The recipient of the 2004 Thomas M. Frost Award is Thomas A. Okey for his 2003 paper “Macrobenthic colonist guilds and renegades in Monterey Canyon drift algae: partitioning multidimensions” (Ecological Monographs 73[3]:415-440). This paper summarizes the ecological impacts of sedimentation on benthic communities in submarine canyons, based on work done for a Master's degree at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories under the direction of Dr. John Oliver. Tom went on to complete his Ph.D. with Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia and is currently a postdoctoral associate at the CSIRO in Australia . The recipient of the Thomas M. Frost Award for 2005 is James Vonesh for his 2002 article “Complex life cycles and density dependence: assessing the contribution of egg mortality to amphibian declines” published in Oecologia (133:325-333). In this paper, James and co-author Omar De la Cruz use demographic models to demonstrate that post-embryonic factors should not be overlooked in studies of amphibian population declines. This paper is just one of several outstanding publications resulting from Dr. Vonesh's dissertation research done at University of Florida under the direction of Craig Osenberg. James is currently a postdoctoral associate at Washington University of St. Louis and will be starting a faculty job at Virginia Commonwealth In December. Best Talk Award Recipient. Wendy Palen was the 2004 recipient of the Best Talk Award given by the Aquatic Ecology Section. Wendy's talk was entitled “UV impacts on alpine amphibians: Linking UV tolerance with field exposure” and was co-authored by Daniel Schindler, Aaron Clauser, and Craig Williamson. Congratulations Wendy! Students wishing to participate in this year's competition should send their application to the Chair (Ace Sarnelle) soon (see below). 2006 Awards. This year we will be giving the Frost Award (see below), as well as a Best Talk Award and Student Travel Awards (see below). Please see the ESA web page for details about the Best Talk Award. Please note: in order to be eligible for the Best Talk Award, students must have applied for the Buell/Braun Awards (deadline was March 1). 2006 business meeting and mixer. We will hold our annual business meeting and mixer at the ESA annual meeting in Memphis , Monday August 7 at 6:30. Free Food (until it runs out)! Don't miss it! Judges Needed! Our Best Student Talk Award is based on evaluations by judges from the Buell competition. Thus, it's critical that members of our section volunteer to serve as judges in the Buell-Braun competition sponsored by the Society. If you are able to serve as a judge for 4-6 papers/posters, please contact Chris Sacchi ( sacchi@kutztown.edu ). It's a relatively minor commitment, yet an important service – plus i n recent years judges have been able to select which talks/posters they judge! NEON Project: Solicitations of Comments (by way of ESA President Nancy Grimm) Over the past 18 months, the design process for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) has engaged hundreds of scientists, including many ESA members, in developing plans for the infrastructure, science, education, networking, and informatics associated with NEON. Two documents—the NEON Integrated Science and Education Plan and the NEON Networking and Informatics Baseline Design—are now available for review (click on the documents section hyperlink to access the PDF files). The NEON Project Office will be accepting comments (see comment forms) for an unspecified time. In addition, NEON is in the NSF's FY 2007 budget request under Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction, which can be viewed here. ESA members who participated in this process deserve the thanks of the rest of us for their hard work. Ecology stands to benefit greatly from the establishment of a NEON and, in turn, the NEON design process can benefit from the thoughtful input of ecologists. NEON won't be everything to everyone, but it can be a community effort to tackle the kinds of questions that cannot be answered by single investigators or small teams. ESA members therefore are encouraged to learn about the NEON design and, if they have concerns or suggestions, to submit comments to the NEON Project Office. We look forward to seeing you this summer in Memphis . -Ace Sarnelle (Chair) GET A FRIEND TO JOIN THE SECTION: To become a member of the Aquatic
Ecology Section costs only $3 (US) for members of the Ecological Society of
America. These dues are used to support student travel awards and pay for the
annual business meeting. Please encourage your colleagues to join the
section. They can join the section or ESA by contacting the ESA Membership
Coordinator, 1990 M St. NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036; phone: (202)
833-8775; or visit http://www.esa.org/. Annual Reports:
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