ESA Governing Board Summer Meeting Minutes

Kentucky International Convention Center, Louisville, KY Boardroom A 10–11 August 2019 Attending: Saturday, 10 August 2019 Laura Huenneke Presiding; meeting called to order at 8:50 AM. Reminders given of fiduciary duties of Governing Board members and mention of safety issues at the convention center (in case of evacuation). Motion: Move to adopt agenda with the modification that the Student and Early Career discussion is moved to later in the day to accommodate a late arrival: Frank Davis moved, Evan DeLucia seconded, all Aye. The Governing Board acknowledges and records the earlier electronic vote to approve the minutes from the 2019 Spring Governing Board Meeting. The Governing Board acknowledges and records the electronic vote in June to appoint Diane Pataki as Vice President for Science (to replace Jayne Belnap who resigned in May 2019). President Huenneke thanked Catherine O'Riordan and the staff for their dedicated and professional work on behalf of ESA. Progress in many areas was summarized, including the launch of the new Web site and the major changes underway for the strategic plan and changes to the Society governance (including revisions to the Bylaws). Ecolog‐L listserve is now under the auspices of ESA. The ESA newsletter has been a successful initiative for communication with the membership and has included a monthly blog post from the President. President Huenneke expressed concern and urgency for continuing the Extending the Tent initiative to include ecologists beyond the traditional core constituency of tenure track and tenured faculty. She remarked that the investment in face‐to‐face meetings for the Publications and Meetings Committees is a positive change. O'Riordan: The Society is fiscally strong; details are available in the Board Book. The meeting will reach its target of 2700 registrants (2648 as of today's date), and it will at least break even financially. Membership has not reached the goal of 8000 members but is not far from that. The NSF grant for SEEDS was awarded ($1.3 M for 5 years). More attention needs to be devoted to ESA development for the Society as a whole. There is a Text‐to‐Give campaign for SEEDS at this Annual Meeting. She also noted that ESA continues efforts to fight misconduct and sexual harassment and will again offer bystander training at the meeting as well as a new online misconduct incident reporting tool, EthicsPoint. Miller: Resume reviews and mock interviews have been arranged for early career members at this year's Career Central in the exhibit hall. Although ESA has a solid core of