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SCB Spring Board Meeting

Reed Noss

Relict Engelmann oak woodlands, noisy acorn woodpeckers, abundant wildflowers, two-striped garter snakes, and vernal pools filled with endemic fairy shrimp were among the burdens the SCB Board of Governors had to bear for its spring meeting (30 March--1 April) in The Nature Conservancy's 8300-acre Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve in southern California. Despite these and other distractions, the board members, committee chairs, editors, and other SCB'ers who gathered at the meeting accomplished some significant tasks. We were unusually decisive!

SCB is at a turning point. We've been around for a decade and a half, we publish a first-rate journal, and our annual meetings are inspiring and well-attended. We haven't done much else, however, and our members want more. In response, over the past few years we have reached out to practitioners with our new magazine, Conservation Biology in Practice, expanded our international activities, and interacted increasingly with the media. Our web page has been reorganized and greatly enlarged. We have nearly a dozen active committees.

Moreover, last summer, in Missoula, the board and members agreed to launch an executive office and take steps to expand our membership. We made significant headway toward achieving these goals at our spring meeting in California. The details of the meeting will be presented in the minutes at a later date. Below, I summarize some of the highlights.

Based on encouraging statistics from the first half of the year, last summer I predicted a substantial increase in SCB membership. I was wrong. Membership stagnated late in the year, with the final figures essentially unchanged from the previous several years. So far, in 2001, our renewals and new memberships are slightly down from 2000. Considering these statistics and our desire to attract more practitioners to SCB, the board decided to make membership automatic with subscription to either of our publications, hence adding Conservation Biology in Practice subscribers as new members of SCB.

In recent years we have essentially broken even on our main journal, Conservation Biology, but the additional costs of running SCB, such as our membership office and the newsletter, have been covered by the profits we make on library subscriptions. This policy has left few spare funds for the activities our members now wish us to undertake, as indicated by our recent poll. To finance the executive office and other SCB initiatives, the board approved a new $15 membership fee for regular members subscribing to Conservation Biology, with no increase for students or members from developing countries. We will revisit and finalize these pricing decisions at our Hilo meeting this summer.

Adding a base dues will allow us to take a giant leap toward establishing our executive office: hiring an Executive Director. Although we are asking much of the candidates for this job, we anticipate numerous applications. We may be able to get free office space in Washington, D.C., which we will announce when offers are confirmed.

SCB's challenge is to expand our activities in the directions requested by our members, without bankrupting SCB or raising membership dues unacceptably. The board believes we have found a reasonable approach to meeting this challenge. I now ask you, our members, for your full support as we move into a new era of science in the service of conservation.

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