Vineyard Conservation Society Annual Meeting

The Annual Meeting of the Vineyard Conservation Society will take place on Thursday, July 12 beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the Wakeman Conservation Center off Lambert’s Cove Road in Tisbury, and will feature a talk by scientist and VCS board member Jesse H. Ausubel.

The business portion of the meeting will include a vote on restating the Articles of Organization, after which Dr. Ausubel will discuss aspects of his ongoing work, in a presentation entitled “Counting all the Fish in the Sea.”

Dr. Ausubel was a main organizer of the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979, which substantially elevated global warming on scientific and political agendas. Recent heightened awareness of climate change and its global effects makes his topic particularly timely. The talk will center on the first Census of Marine Life, a project involving scientists from 80 nations.

Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in the living marine resource, the Census is designed to help identify threatened species and important nurseries, thus improving management of living marine resources, some of which have already been decimated. From microbes to mammals, Arctic to Antarctic, abyss to surface, and near shore to mid-ocean, the Census, which will be completed in 2010, aims to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in our seas.

Jesse Ausubel is the Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City as well as an adjunct faculty member at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. During the past decade he helped launch and lead three of the most significant cooperative international programs in biodiversity science: the Census of Marine Life, the Barcode of Life Initiative (to develop short DNA identifiers for all species of animals and plants), and the Encyclopedia of Life (to create a web page for all the world’s 1.8 million plants, animals, and fungi).

The Vineyard Conservation Society is a non-profit membership organization dedicated to preserving the environment, character and quality of life of Martha’s Vineyard through advocacy, education, and the protection of the Island’s land and waters.

Refreshments will be served, and the event is free and open to all. For more information, call the VCS office at 508-693-9588.