What's New
Slate of Officers and Councillors for 2020-2021
Slate for 2020-2021 Council: In accordance with the three-week notice provision of the Bylaws of the Club, the following slate of officers and councillors was presented to the membership in February 2020. Because of the coronavirus pandemic and meeting cancellation in March, the slate could not be voted on at the Annual Meeting on 7 March 2020. However, Article VIII of our Bylaws stipulates that the election can occur at any other meeting called by the Council, and thus we will vote whenever we are able to meet again.
EAGLE HILL INSTITUTE DISCOUNTS: The Eagle Hill Institute, Steuben, ME, is again offering NEBC members a 20% discount for the seminars and workshops it offers on the eastern Maine coast. This is applied towards tuition and accommodations, but not meals. Also, NEBC will give a stipend of $150 towards costs for the first 10 NEBC members who register for a botany course. Contact the Association Manager at nebc@rhodora.org for details. Eagle Hill calendar. Seminars are cancelled until late June and later ones are pending.
Associate Editors and Reviewing Editors for Rhodora Requested
NEBC's newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Melanie Schori, seeks additional Associate Editors for Rhodora to serve for three-year terms and several Reviewing Editors to serve two-year terms. Associate Editors will be expected to handle 4–6 manuscripts per year on their topic area by contacting potential reviewers, reviewing the manuscript themselves, and sending collated responses to the Editor-in-Chief. Reviewing Editors will be asked to review 1–2 manuscripts per year on their topic area and should either be graduate students or recent graduates who will be mentored through the reviewing process to gain experience. NEBC membership is not required for either type of editorship. Those interested should send an email describing their relevant expertise and experience (or lack thereof) to editor@rhodora.org.
Special Announcement: New Editor-in-Chief of Rhodora
The New England Botanical Club is pleased to announce that
Dr. Melanie Schori has been appointed the new Editor-in-Chief of the club's journal
Rhodora, effective October 2019. Dr. Schori will assume leadership of the journal from Dr. Nishanta Rajakaruna who has ably led the journal team since 2015.
Dr. Schori has been a member of the New England Botanical Club since 2001. She holds a B.S. in Plant Science from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from Ohio University, where she completed a dissertation focused on a systematic revision of Gomphandra (Stemonuraceae). Melanie has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and at Ohio University. Since 2017 she has worked as a botanist and nomenclatural authority for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Germplasm Research Information Network Taxonomy system. Melanie is the author of over 20 peer-reviewed papers, solicited publications, and technical reports focusing on botanical topics. In addition to her botanical and academic work, she also has experience as a freelance editor, copy editor, and associate editor, including significant work with Rhodora. Reflecting on her work as an Associate Editor with Rhodora, Nishi reported that "Melanie was always on top of her game… She was always willing to help authors with their manuscripts and often went over and beyond helping them with writing." The Editor-in-Chief search committee was also greatly impressed with Melanie's botanical expertise, her record of highly relevant experiences and publications, and her enthusiastic interest in stepping into the leadership role at Rhodora. The search committee unanimously felt that Melanie shows great promise for building on the strong legacy of Nishi's recent work as Editor-in-Chief, and her vision for the future of the journal will ensure its continued success in coming years. Nishi commented that Melanie "has the expertise and experience to take Rhodora to new heights."
The New England Botanical Club would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Nishi's outstanding work as Editor-in-Chief at Rhodora and thank him for his energetic service to the organization. He has solidified Rhodora's position as one of the premier venues for publishing botanical research related to the flora of the northeastern U.S. and adjacent Canada and has introduced important new high visibility elements to the journal, such as "Featured Review," which has attracted considerable attention from the broader botanical community. Nishi has built an impressive foundation to support the new Editor-in-Chief and to successfully launch the next chapter of Rhodora's venerable history. We thank him for his extraordinary efforts and great skill in his work as Editor-in-Chief. Nishi will continue as a Senior Editor at Rhodora during the transition of leadership, until the end of 2019.
Important announcement regarding NEBC monthly meetings for 2019-2020: Starting in September 2019, NEBC will undertake an exploratory shift to holding our regular monthly meetings on Saturday afternoons at 4:00PM+. This change follows from discussions in NEBC Council last spring about ways to increase member participation at monthly meetings. In our online survey from 2018, we saw that a large number of NEBC members found the traditional meeting time on Friday evenings difficult to accommodate in their work and personal schedules and inconvenient for travel into the Boston area. Our hope is that the new meeting time on Saturday afternoons might support increased participation from NEBC members, both for those in the Boston area and for members from further afield. We also hope that this shift might allow for greater involvement in other club activities associated with the meetings, such as volunteer hours in the herbarium or workshops that will be planned for Saturday afternoons prior to 4:00 PM. We will undertake this new meeting time on a trial basis in 2019-2020 and plan to re-assess in the spring when looking ahead to setting the schedule for Fall 2020 meetings. Please feel free to share your comments or concerns about this change with NEBC by emailing president@rhodora.org
Schedule for Nonvascular Herbarium Work Sessions to June 2020
We welcome volunteers to help us with curatorial work in the nonvascular herbarium of the NEBC. Listed below are the scheduled work sessions. If you would like to join us or have questions, please email Elizabeth Kneiper (Ekneiper@aol.com) or call 781-801-2734. We look forward to hearing from you! Weather and various other circumstances can force the sessions to be canceled or rescheduled, but volunteers will be notified.
Type of work: Curatorial - replacing old packets, data basing, and inserting collections. A great chance to work with historic collections of New England lichens, bryophytes, algae, and fungi.
Location: Farlow Herbarium, 22 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA.
Dates: Cancelled until further notice.
