Our plenary speaker on Thursday evening will be Jessica Whitehead, the coastal communities hazards adaptation specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant. She assists coastal users with integrating information about resilience to coastal weather and climate hazards into their decision-making processes. She is assisting with the development of public-private partnerships to improve risk communication and disaster recovery on Hatteras Island and throughout North Carolina as the state recovers from Hurricane Florence. Recently, she has also become more interested in using the arts to improve community understanding of and engagement with resilience. She was the science interpretation advisor on the RISING exhibition, which features fine art photography by photographer Baxter Miller and oral histories of coastal change in North Carolina collected by Ryan Stancil and Barbara Garrity-Blake, informed by coastal science and integrated in a multimedia experience.

Registration is now open for the Spring 2019 SEERS meeting, to be held Thursday, March 7, through Saturday, March 9, 2019. All sessions will be held at UNCW’s Center for Marine Science. The meeting theme will be the “Art of Resilience.”As disturbances become more frequent, the need to focus on how coastal ecosystems bounce back after a disturbance becomes important. We are currently finalizing room blocks at local hotels for lodging and will have updates on that soon. As always, check our Next Meeting page for up-to-date meeting details. We hope to see everyone in March!

Calling all artists! SEERS anticipates the launch of our new Student Estuarine EDucation (SEED) fund at our 2019 Spring meeting. However, we are in need of a logo to represent this award, which will be granted to help student research.

The rules? Create a logo that is complimentary to our current SEERS logo, but represents the purpose of the SEED fund. Please submit all entries to Cassondra Thomas by emailing her at president@seers.org. Entries will be accepted until February 8, 2019; the winner will be announced at our Spring meeting.

SEERS welcomed two new board members at the 2018 Spring meeting. Enrique Reyes joined as President-Elect and Frank Lopez joined as Member at Large. Jessica Reichmuth stayed on to serve a second term as Program Chair. Welcome to the new Board members and thanks to Dr. Reichmuth for serving another term!

With the rotation of president positions, Cassondra Thomas is now the President of SEERS and Erik Smith is the Past President.

Thanks to outgoing Past President Geno Olmi for his service to the society.