A Message from Mark Wolf-Armstrong, CERF Executive Director

Hello CERF Members and Friends!

I am very excited about a new year for CERF, and am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Federation. I am also grateful to all of you for your gracious welcome into the CERF family.

CERF has great heritage and accomplishment, and this will provide the foundation for future success. We have a new team in leadership with Walter Boynton and new Board members, a new strategic plan, a new CERF office in Washington State and many opportunities to make a difference in the world.

Against this backdrop is our awareness of the many challenges we face on our planet. CERF embraces the real need to advance our knowledge and inject it into public discourse and decision-making, and to educate our colleagues, our students, our leaders and the public about the exquisite realms of estuaries and coasts. We are, after all, an estuarine species, and what we do in these essential and rich ecosystems will foretell the future of the many other habitats of the world. It will affect our food, our water, our air, our security, our well-being.

 Our new strategic plan (2012-2016) gives us clear guidance based on collective visions for going forward. The seven goal areas of Research, Publications, International activities, Policy, Education, Communications and Membership and Affiliate Societies provide a comprehensive road map for focusing our efforts and resources. Of course, none of these stand alone like silos. They are more of Venn diagram with many parts entwined.

In the coming months, I will look carefully at this strategic consensus and determine points of high leverage where we get multiple returns across various goals. For example, if we succeed in engaging and serving more students in CERF, it will have a multiplier effect on all the other goals. This is not a one-way street of course; it is interactive and synergistic.

At the start of the year, we also have exciting and immediate projects on our radar for 2012. We will:

• inaugurate our first international conference in November 2012 in Mar del Plata, Argentina,
• launch a robust effort to make CERF 2012 in San Diego a stellar success,
• renew and enhance our partnership with our publisher for Estuaries and Coasts,
• energize our communications with membership with vigorous new approaches to social media and other dynamic tools for interlacing CERF society,
• initiate and renew external partnerships that will advance our strategic plan, and
• select a great city and site for CERF 2015.

I hope each of you enters this New Year healthy and reinvigorated, and ready to lead and help. There is an old Japanese proverb that says “one arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.” CERF’s quiver contains the talents and aspirations of all of you, and your investment in our future success is the single most important ingredient in our success!

All the best,

Mark Wolf-Armstrong
Executive Director