NEERS News

By the time this newsletter appears in your mailboxes, the Spring 2006 meeting of the New England Estuarine Research Society will be close at hand. It will be held at the Nantasket Beach Hotel and Conference Center in Hull, Massachusetts from April 6-8. NEERS President Pam Neubert and John Brawley are the organizers.

The meeting will begin with a special symposium, "Love that (not so) Dirty Water: Science and Management of an Urban Estuary." This will focus on recent changes in Boston Harbor sparked by the clean up. The symposium will provide historical and current perspectives, will review some of the past controversies related to the clean up, discuss what the Boston Harbor clean up can teach the nation, and look to the future.

Friday and Saturday morning will be devoted to contributed paper sessions. The banquet will be held on Friday evening, and, as always, student award candidates are entitled to a free banquet ticket. Pam assures us that there are appropriate post-meeting venues for dancing near the hotel.

Check the NEERS website (www.neers.org) for updates on the meeting and registration information. The deadline for preregistration was March 17.

NEERS is moving toward all electronic meeting announcements to save both time and postage. We encourage all NEERS members to sign up for the list server so that they can receive timely announcements about meetings and other important NEERS business. The list server is also an excellent tool to communicate with colleagues about estuarine matters and to post job announcements. Our experience shows that traffic on the NEERS list server has been light so it will add very little to your normal email flow. The NEERS website contains instructions on how to sign up.

The second Sudden Wetland Dieback Symposium is scheduled for May 24th at the Wellfleet, MA Senior Center. The objectives of this workshop are to introduce a wider audience to the issue of sudden wetland dieback, obtain an update from New England states on recent observations and research efforts, and listen to the latest findings of researchers from other regions. The meeting will also include a field trip to dieback sites near the meeting location on Cape Cod. Susan Adamowicz (USFWS), Ron Rozsa (Connecticut DEP), and Steve Smith (Cape Cod National Seashore) are the meeting organizers. Information on this meeting is on the NEERS website, which also is hosting a list server on the issue.

We look forward to seeing you at NEERS Spring 2006.