PLENARY PRESENTATIONS

DECEMBER 1-3, 2020 Note: This year's conference was held virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Presented Tuesday, December 1, 2020, 12:15-12:45 PM ET

Ewel, Katherine C., University of Florida The Society of Wetland Scientists was the brain child of Richard Macomber, an employee of the US Army Corps of Engineers who was responsible for giving short courses and workshops on the protection and management of waterways and wetlands. His dream came to fruition in March 1980, when around 35 people gathered together in Tampa, Florida, for the first SWS meeting. This was a time when information about wetlands was hard to come by, and "reaching in" to each other's resources helped members to accumulate and assimilate advances in wetland science. The society grew rapidly, eventually including roughly equal numbers of academic scientists, government employees, and consultants. An early riff between the expectations of academic members and others was settled by all groups working together to form the SWS Professional Certification Program, which itself has thrived. While "reaching in" to tend to the well-being of the society, SWS also "reached out" to attract more international members. It has also joined with other societies to educate policy makers about the importance of wetlands and the possible consequences of proposed legislation. Wetland science is concerned with the connections among different ecosystems and landscapes; SWS is concerned with tending to the needs of its own members as well as society as a whole. n

Presented Wednesday, December 2, 2020, 12:00-12:30 PM ET

Kumar, Ritesh, Wetlands International South Asia In 2021, the Ramsar Convention will be marking 50th year of one of the oldest multilateral environmental agreements on a single ecosystem, the wetlands. At the heart of Convention is the wise use philosophy, which, at the time of adoption of the Convention text in 1971, marked a novel framing of human-nature interdependency as the basis of delivering conservation as well as sustainable development outcomes. Wise use of wetlands is defined in the text of Ramsar Convention as ‘maintenance of ecological character, achieved through the implementation of ecosystem approaches, within the context of sustainable development”. While wise use has broader connotation, ecological character has been defined in a narrow sense, mostly aligning with stationarity, and relegating humans as external agents behind adverse changes in ecosystem. Managing wetlands in this era of rapid human-mediated transformation requires analytical approaches which consider integrated systems of human and nature as a unit of analysis, overcoming the human-nature dualism which has underpinned conservation approaches thus far. There is emerging scholarship which encourages a coupled view of ecological and social systems, as an alternate to framing of nature as setting context for human interactions, or human enterprise as an external disturbance acting upon ecosystems. In this talk, an alternate framing of wetland wise use and wetlands character is discussed, proposing replacement of wetland ecological character by an inclusive term ‘wetland character’ as a manifestation of a plurality of values and multiple worldviews. Wise use consequently becomes the maintenance of wetland character. n

Presented Thursday, December 3, 2020, 3:10-3:40 PM ET

Wilcox, Douglas A., SUNY Brockport Development of wetland science as a distinct field required consolidation of wetland-related publications in a recognized wetland journal. Growth of SWS was thus tied to developing its own publication outlet. Wetlands debuted as the proceedings of the SWS meeting held in 1981, became a peer-reviewed proceedings in 1982, and was opened to outside submissions in 1983. Changes in the journal through the years included coverage in abstracting services, a larger page format, an electronic distribution option,