The Ecological Society of Australia – a perspective of its growth over two decades (1990-2010)

Craig James

CSIRO Ecosystem Science and the CRC for Remote Economic Participation.

GPO Box 284, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

Craig James was President of ESA 2002-2004 and Members Service Prize recipient in 2010

My start: 1987-1992

I joined ESA in 1987 as a 3rd year PhD student. I attended my first ESA conference in GeraldtonWA in 1988. At the time I was doing PhD research on lizards in central Australia where I was hosted by the wonderful people at the CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology (as it was then) laboratory in Alice Springs. A contingent of Alice Springs people travelled to Geraldton and made seminal contributions to the proceedings (Saunders et al. 1990) that was produced from that meeting. I had prior to this ESA meeting given only one talk at a professional society meeting (Australian Society of Herpetologists) and remember that event as one of excruciating nervousness and consequently a faltering delivery. This time it was different – I had a few project proposal seminars under my belt and had more confidence, luckily because the unthinkable happened. Some few minutes into the talk the slide projector jammed and I watched horrified as several people wielded Leatherman and other tools to free the mechanism. I carried on, trying to use words to illustrate the graphs and tables that I didn’t have on screen. Eventually the slides were back; it was probably over in only a minute but it felt like an entire session. I must have at least scored votes in the sympathy category because I won one of the student presentation prizes. That meeting cemented my membership of ESA and led to about two decades of close association with the running of the Society.

In the next few years I was absorbed with finishing the PhD and a postdoc in the US. I returned to Australia in 1991 and rekindled my association with the Society. I got swept up in the organisation of the ESA conference in Canberra in 1992 where I found that there were no systems to link the membership list of the Society to conference planning, nor were there electronic files of the people who attended the previous years’ conference to work from. Working with Jill Landsberg at this time was a treat and we both recognised that the Society would be well-served with better systems for the management of its members. I was a pretty competent database programmer back then and I suggested that we create an electronic membership database on the back of the system I had thrown together for the conference. I recall being shown, the financial records for members kept by the Treasurer on paper record cards and being told that this set of cards was handed from one Treasurer to the next. I also received an Excel or Word file from the Secretary which was the membership list used for mailing. I volunteered to set-up a database to coalesce the management of membership issues in one system. Effectively this step set in train a number of changes that were to come in the Society.

I served the Society formally in the roles of Membership Manager (1992 – 1998), Vice President (2000 – 2001), President (2002 – 2004), and Past President (2005 – 2007). I also worked on the organising committee for two of the Society’s annual conferences and INTECOL 10. The following paragraphs are my recollections of how the Society has changed from the early 1990’s. I have probably forgotten some key changes, and may have imperfectly remembered how things came about but I hope to capture the atmosphere of innovation and excitement that was around and the people who made it all happen.

Membership growth: 1992-2000

Through the 90’s the Society enjoyed considerable growth when many other professional groups were stagnant or declining in numbers. I believe this was the result of three factors: value for members from conferences and publications; attention to attracting and retaining members; and governance and management systems.

There was a focus on making the Society relevant to members through a high quality bulletin and an annual conference that was effective for communication and networking. Beginning in 1992, the previous custom of holding themed conferences every two years (with associated published proceedings), alternating with years of open forum meetings, was first changed to the current format in which there are multiple mini-symposia and open fora sessions in every year's meeting. The mini-symposium format both encourages many people to participate in planning and attending the conference and it ensures that the sessions are topical. More effective use of the time available for presentation and interaction over research at conferences was engendered through the introduction of stamps-for-drinks at poster sessions, first introduced at the conference held at WollongongUniversity in 2001. The Bulletin remained a flagship communication device and flourished under the direction of dedicated Bulletin Editors and energetic Regional Councillors.

The second factor was a more integrated membership philosophy. In this period the new membership management system was bedded-in and as the Society grew so too did the number of functions that the system performed. With the managerial role split from the Secretary and Treasurer there was more attention to membership drives, welcoming new members, keeping in contact with existing members, processing address changes and renewals and encouraging multi-year subscriptions. There was a strong and deliberate strategy to make the Society especially welcoming and friendly for student members. There wasn’t a particular change from the past in respect of student members, but rather initiatives such as the postgraduate student day, low student joining fees, student prizes and awards were introduced and/or strengthened in the 90s.

The third factor was the debate that was under way in the Council and beyond for how the Society should function as it grew. Part of this debate was planning for how to run conferences as the numbers attending were starting to outgrow the venues typically available in universities, and to outgrow voluntary organising committees. Moving to commercial conference centres and concern for the loss of intimacy (and increased cost) of the meetings was on a lot of peoples’ mind. Another (and more contentious) part of the debate was the move to having paid staff. Up until this era of growth the Society had mostly volunteers running its affairs (with the exceptions being expenditure on editorial costs). Enlarged membership led to greater work loads on volunteers and so planning turned to the idea of a paid Executive Officer and paid financial and membership management. The Society was slowly moving toward these appointments which came in the next decade.

Organisational change: 2000-2005

With such a large and active Society, revenues were healthy, annual conferences were booming and the workload on voluntary Councillors was becoming too much. Over the term of three ESA Presidents (Richard Hobbs, Jann Williams and me) discussions of business plans, new journals, revenue streams and costs of paying salaried employees were debated. Research was done into how sister Ecological Societies in the UK and USA made a transition from volunteers to salaried officers and the mistakes they made that we attempted to avoid.

The Society did several ambitious things in the relatively short period of 2000-2005. It launched a new journal (Environmental Management & Restoration (EMR)); renamed its existing Journal (Australian Journal of Ecology to Austral Ecology); introduced a business plan as a road map for operation; it started employing support staff; and overhauled governance procedures. Given the financial risks associated with this set of changes, it is testament to the Society’s resilience and leadership through this period that very little went wrong.

The inaugural strategic plan and business plan of ESA were founded in extensive consultation with members and endorsed at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) in 2002 – the first such guiding documents since the Society’s formation in 1962. These plans set out the existing practices and organisational changes in a common framework for more strategic management. Existing practices that were reinforced were the commitment to quality journals, bulletin, conferences and events; research, travel and commendation awards for postgraduate students; networking with other organisations; and members’ services and membership growth. New operational innovations included: increased expenditure on paid employees (Executive Officer), contractors, and volunteers; increased expenditure on financial management and information technologies; increased attention to investments, grants, donations and bequests to generate income; and increased expenditure on communication of ecological information to government, community environment groups, undergraduate and school education, and other professional ecological bodies. Several changes were made to improve the governance of the Society from 2000 to 2004: the roles and responsibility statements for Councillors were revised and made clearer; the requirement for the members of the Executive subcommittee of Council to reside in one location was dropped, the creation of the position of president-elect and a staggered succession plan for Councillor positions was introduced to create overlap periods for better hand over from one president to the next and to carry corporate memory forward more effectively. AGM’s were never dull as we changed the Society’s constitution incrementally four years in a row! Perhaps the most pleasing innovation for a number of people who had been active in this period of change was a change to the format of the AGMs in 2002 whereby written reports were circulated prior to the AGM rather than having spoken reports at AGMs. Questions and discussion on each written paper were shorter and the AGMs were business-like and easily completed in an hour-long lunchbreak.

Final words

Some readers may have noticed that I have made little mention of one topic in the essay thus far: the Journals. Austral Ecology pre-dates and will post date everything noted above. I found it hard to know where to weave it in to the chronology of changes because it is a constant feature. As the flagship publication of the Society Austral Ecology is an incredibly significant part of the Society’s profile and financial success and has been led by Mike Bull for more years than I can calculate, Similarly, EMR has established itself as a solid sister journal to AE and also ably led through its first decade by the Managing Editor Tein McDonald and the successive Chairs of the Editorial Board, Richard Hobbs and Jann Williams.

Finally, I can’t write these recollections without mentioning a number of people who were instrumental in developing the strategic changes mentioned above. With apologies to those who I may forget to mention by name the following individuals devoted an enormous amount of time to discussions with me about the Society that they were (and still are!) committed to. These people are (alphabetically): Mike Bull, Peter Fairweather, Kris French, Richard Hobbs, Jill Landsberg, Tony Norton, Mark Westoby, Rob Whelan, Jann Williams and Ray Wills.

Reference

Saunders, DA, Hopkins, AJM, and How, RA. (editors) 1990. Australian Ecosystems: 200 years of Utilization, Degradation and Reconstruction - Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia. Surrey Beatty and Sons, Chipping Norton, Australia. 602 pp.