Proceedings of the Sixty-first Annual Meeting of the Northeastern ...

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Northeastern Weed Science Society
60 th Annual Meeting
January 4, 2006
The Westin, Providence, Rhode Island
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Timothy E. Dutt
Agricultural Consultant
Fogelsville, PA
GOING FORWARD
I want to welcome everybody to the 60 th annual meeting of our society. Providence is a
new meeting location for us, and I want to thank Dr. Michael Sullivan for his remarks welcoming
us to the area. We are meeting jointly with the Northeast Aquatic Plant Management Society
(NEAPMS). This organization was formed in 1999 and has about 140 members composed of
people from industry, applicators, state regulators, and university researchers mostly from the
New York and New England area. Our organizations have much in common since we work on
weed management issues, have interest in invasive species, and meet during January. Renee
Keese, our Vice President and program chair, has worked with the aquatics people to develop a
joint symposium this afternoon to be followed by a weed ID workshop and a joint social. You
will notice some changes to our traditional meeting format so that we can take advantage of our
meeting together and provide for interaction. I also want to congratulate all of our award
winners for their contributions and dedication to our society and weed science.
With this being our 60 th annual meeting, we have reached another milestone in our
history. Figure 1 shows membership numbers over the 60-year history of our society. Although
our society is getting smaller, we are still a very active and relevant organization. Today, I want
to focus my remarks on our society’s initiatives and progress since our 50 th anniversary meeting
in 1996, and announce a new initiative going forward into the next decade of our history.
Major initiatives of our society over the past 10 years began with the Education
Committee in 1997. The committee was chaired by Nate Hartwig and looked at what our
society’s mission should be around outreach and education. To a great extent, this initiative set
the framework that Executive Committees and our society followed over the last 10 years. It
established direction for many of our meeting program activities that we do today, launched
increased efforts with invasive species, and initiated the development of our website. The
NEWSS website was launched in late 1999 and has gone through many phases of development
over the past 5 years. It has provided much efficiency by moving us towards electronic
communication with our membership. Our organization has provided leadership among the
other regional societies and WSSA on legislative initiatives, with Rich Bonanno as chairman of
the WSSA Washington Liaison Committee and Rob Hedberg as Director of Science Policy. We
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