Minutes compiled by: Charles Chester

Note: This meeting took place after our second Dialogues on Conservation Biology - From Massachusetts to the World entitled "PLANTING THE SEEDS OF CONSERVATION: Public participation in native plant restoration"

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

Financial Report
We have filed our financial reports for the past two years with the state attorney general.

In general, our financial picture is looking better, with donations from the Board, members, and others. To Do: Kamil Bawa wants to know what the donation from ATREE will be used for.

Bylaws
It was noted that the bylaws provided to Hale and Dorr (the “official” ones) are different than those pasted on the web and those provided through SCB. The Hale and Dorr version is more general. We may need to straighten out this discrepancy.

We discussed the possibility of changes the terms of office to two years.

Executive Board
To Do: Lelia will contact Steve Curwood about the media representative position, which is currently open.

The education representative position is open too. Dr. David Niebuhr was mentioned as a possibility for that one.

Sarah and Gib have new email addresses. Charles will send out an email to the Board containing all updated email addresses.

Membership
About 48 members are paid. 12 are due now. We have 450 people on our email list. Charles has entire mailing list from SCB as an Excel spreadsheet.

Conservation Perspectives
Gregory Walsh of Natural New England wants to distribute our Conservation Perspectives as an insert to his magazine. Our mailing list, however, is too large for him to send out magazines for free. We will send out a letter to the mailing list asking who is interested. It will go out with a letter to potential NESCB members introducing ourselves.

Fundraising
Jamie will confer with Elizabeth about sending a letter to Lou Hamil of Hale and Dorr concerning our ability to solicit money from potential donors. To Do:We need an accountant to look at that.

Web Site
Lelia reported that we have had 45,690 hits since November 2000.

The Advocacy, Job Listings, Careers, Programs, Education, and News pages need updating and are hard for Lelia to keep up with on her own. The consensus of the group is that our web site should consolidate with the removal of inactive pages. Lelia suggested we need to spend some time on the links page, which gets lots of hits. Better use of links would enable us to consolidate and put less stress on us (primarily Lelia) to constantly update certain parts of our website. For example, we could have a link to an environmental jobs site rather than having our own careers page. Our conservation page could have links to New England state environmental agencies and NGO sites. The Board then spent some time outlining what the revamped websites with enhance links would look like.

Dialogues on Conservation Biology review
Everyone was very pleased with the just concluded Dialogues on Conservation Biology that the NESCB had sponsored at Tufts. There was a large, engaged audience, and the two speakers (Richard Primack and Elizabeth Farnsworth) did excellent presentations. To Do: We agreed to send a letter to Jose officially thanking him for designing the poster for the event.

The Board discussed the possibility of webcasting the next time we hold an event like this. We should at least take photos that can be posted on the web site.

We are working on another Dialogues in Conservation Biology for June. The topic will be Climate Change and potential speakers mentioned were Barry Rock of UNH and Bill Moomaw of Tufts.

Biodiversity Days
We discussed the possibility of cosponsoring a Biodiversity Days event with the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology where Peter Alden is already planning something. To Do: We will send an email to our membership to see who is willing to help out.

Conservation Careers Day
This will be held on April 22 at Salem State College. Sarah Rhodes is coordinating this. There will be some oral presentations and organizations will be invited to have booths. We suggested she look for to see who participated in the past and ask them if they want to do it again.

Name Change
Jamie who was not at the meeting has the proper form to send around. To Do: She will send it around.

Conservation Science Network
Steve has been taking the lead on this. He said that it costs $699 to get Filemaker Pro – Unlimited which would provide an interactive database for the Internet. We need to use Filemaker as a database and then have someone write a script to make it searchable. It could be put on a Salem State College server. Lisa has a potential volunteer who could get it done – estimated time it will take is eight months.

We are set on the text of the description of SCB and the Network.

Steve needs to write an application letter for organizations that may want to use the Network. The applications will be reviewed by the Executive Board.

We want to limit access, at least initially.