Report from the President
AFS President Steve McMullin
The 148th Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society will take place August 19-23 in Atlantic City, NJ. We expect more than 1,500 fisheries professionals to network and share information related to the meeting theme, “Communicating the science of fisheries conservation to diverse audiences.” The meeting theme reflects the three main priorities of my plan of work:
- Increasing diversity within the fisheries profession.
- Communicating fisheries science to professional and nontechnical audiences.
- Revising the AFS strategic plan for the period 2020-2024.
What have we accomplished relative to those priorities? A few of the highlights include…Read more
Accomplishing Our Mission - 2017 Highlights
Annual Meeting in Tampa
The 147th Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society in August brought more than 1,600 attendees and guests from 15 countries together in a beautiful waterfront location in Tampa, Florida. The meeting featured 74 symposia and 17 contributed paper sessions for a total of more than 1,000 oral and 200 poster presentations.
Free Journals Online for Members
In 2017, AFS announced that its suite of five journals and Fisheries magazine would be published by Wiley beginning in January 2018. The new agreement included free online access to all AFS journals for AFS individual members.
Journal Visibility
The Featured Paper program in AFS journals returned in December 2016 and five featured papers were published in 2017. Featured papers are singled out by journal editors as articles that are especially topical, important, likely to be of widespread interest, or otherwise worthy of special promotion and this accords them…
Meet a Few Hutton Scholars
“I learned that without conservation it wouldn’t be long before we had nothing left. I believe the most important thing I learned from the Hutton Program is that hatcheries, fish biologists, and harvesting seasons are way more important than I ever thought they were. And how the world needs these things and that they are not just a luxury.”
Recovering America’s Wildlife Act
WHAT IS THE RECOVERING AMERICA’S WILDLIFE ACT? In December 2017, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) introduced the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act in the House, a major step forward in securing $1.3 billion annually for state fish and wildlife agencies to undertake significant, proactive conservation of imperiled species. In 2016, the Blue Ribbon Panel […]
Waters of the United States
The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are pursuing a two-step process to repeal the 2015 Waters of the U.S. rule and replace it with a narrower legal definition promoted that would provide fewer protections for headwaters and wetlands. The 2015 rule was developed using the best available, peer-reviewed science and clarifies which […]
Report from the Executive Director
Executive Director Doug Austen
There were many reasons to be grateful in 2017. Society membership numbers were up from the previous year. Folks told us that making all of our journals accessible online for free was a momentous benefit. Not only did they find out that they had free access to five journals, plus Fisheries, but they saw publications with a new look and a more dynamic social media presence. For example, working with our new publisher, Wiley, we planned collective, interactive issues that will become a regular “gift” to our fisheries science students and professionals well into the future.
President Steve McMullin and the Governing Board focused on a number of issues to move the Society ..…Read more
