President's Message

Following the recent elections for the new Board of Directors of the ISSLR, I took over the presidency of the society from Brian Timms.  With Zheng Mianping as vice-president, Bob Jellison who kindly agreed to serve the society as general secretary/treasurer, and seven members-at-large from all over the globe I trust we have a strong board that will advance the interests of the society in the coming years.

First of all I want to thank my predecessor Brian Timms, who has served the society as its president since the death of Bill Williams, who had founded the society and had presided over the organization in its first years.  I am pleased that Brian will continue serving the society as a member of the board, and I hope to learn much from his vast experience as president.

At the time of the previous board elections, a number of colleagues had nominated me as candidate for president.  I then declined the nomination.  The main reason for doing so was that I was (and to some extent still am) pessimistic concerning the future of the ISSLR.  We are a small society, possibly too small to be viable.  There are of course a number of core members who have attended most or all previous meetings, but these are not many.  Each of the triennial symposia has attracted a fair number of local attendees, senior scientists, students, managers and employees from industrial companies, nature protection agencies, etc., but only few of these have become members kept paying membership dues and have remained active in the society.

To some extent I still am a pessimist concerning the future of the ISSLR, but the glorious symposium held in May 2008 in Salt Lake City has given me considerable hope for the future. Having attended only a relatively small number of the society’s earlier meeting (Beijing, 1994; Death Valley, 1999; Perth, 2005) I do not claim that I can judge all earlier events, but I have the strong feeling that the symposium organized by Wayne Wurtsbaugh and his crew of local organizers was our best meeting ever. A society that can organize such a high quality meeting surely has the right of existence.  The success of the Salt Lake City symposium has also greatly strengthened the financial basis of our society.

One of the important events at the recent triennial symposia is the awarding of the Bill Williams award for the best lecture and poster presentations by students at the meetings. This award perpetuates the memory of the late William D. Williams who took the initiative toward the establishment of the association.  It was the wish of Bill Williams to establish a framework for publications on salt lake research.  The journal founded by him, the International Journal of Salt Lake Reseach, later merged with Hydrobiologia (Kluwer, later Springer).  The journal Hydrobiologia was last used for publication of proceedings of the Perth 2005 meeting, and appeared to be highly problematic.  It took more than three and a half years before a very small selection of papers from the Perth meeting could finally be published in a special edition of that journal.  The organizers of the Salt Lake City meeting have chosen for a different framework for the publication of the proceeding.  I am pleased to note that less than 10 months after the meeting the final version of the proceedings is already available online as open access volume in the S.J. and Jessie E. Quinney National Resources Research Library, College of Natural Resources, Utah State University.  The volume contains 51 chapters and 269 pages (see http://www.cnr.usu.edu/quinney/htm/publications/nrei), and will soon be available as a printed volume at a very attractive price.

The next major challenge of the ISSLR is the organization of the upcoming international symposium.  The fact that no less than four colleagues had offered to host the 2010 event shows that there is no lack of interest in these symposia (another reason for me to be less pessimistic now about the future of the society).  Based on the online votes by the society’s members and discussions among the board, we have invited Enrique Bucher to host the next symposium at Mar Chiquita, Argentina.  Remembering the very high level of the Salt Lake City 2008 symposium, it will be not easy to meet or that standard and if possible improve on it.  Together with the other members of the board I will do all I can to assist Enrique with the organization of the meeting.

Aharon Oren – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
orena@cc.huji.ac.il

March 2009