It gives me great pleasure to be writing this editorial for the first time as incoming Chair of the Society for Ecological Restoration International. I take over this responsibility at the end of SERI’s biennial conference in Perth, Western Australia, in August, and I am deeply honored and humbled to serve the Society in this position. I am excited at the appointment of our new Executive Director, Amanda Jorgenson, who comes to us from the California Native Plant Society, who will be based in Washington DC, and who will be instrumental in continuing to implement the Society’s strategic plan. I have been involved in the Society since 1991 when
I attended my first SER conference in Orlando, Florida, and was hooked by the purpose, excitement, and dedication of all those fellow travelers who are members, officers, and staff of the Society. I have been working in the field of restoration ecology, principally in mined lands, studying the soil microbial community in these systems, how it can inform us of the state of the ecosystem we are trying to restore and how it can be used to enhance the rate at which systems recover, and developing methodologies and applications for use by practitioners and regulators.
