Welcome to the 2009 State Meeting!

Mark your calendars now for a visit to Yachats, "Gem of the Oregon Coast". The Annual Meeting will be held on June 5-7 and is being organized by the Corvallis Chapter. Field trips and the banquet will be on June 6th. Dr. Tom Kaye,Executive Director of the Institute for Applied Ecology, will be the featured banquet speaker. His topic will be coastal habitats and rare plant conservation in Oregon.

Due to the close proximity of field trip locations to Yachats, several sites will be on the itinerary of more than one field trip. Of special interest will be the opportunity to visit the Jim and Janice Gerdemann Botanical Garden.

Keynote Speaker- Dr. Tom Kaye

Institute of Applied Ecology

The banquet will feature Dr. Tom Kaye as keynote speaker. Tom is Executive Director of the Institute for Applied Ecology (IAE). He will address the topic of Oregon Coast ecosystems and the challenges they present for rare plant conservation. His talk will present an overview of various coastal habitats and then focus on some particular species as examples of IAE’s conservation efforts.

Tom was NPSO Corvallis Chapter President in the 1987-88 time-period. He received his M.S. from Oregon State University in 1989 with a study of the rare Olympic Mts. milk vetch (Astragalus cottonii). In 1991, Tom was recipient of NPSO’s Leighton Ho Memorial Field Botany Award for his study of the endangered Bradshaw’s desert parsley (Lomatium bradshawii) at Mt. Pisgah in Lane Co. This study was published in the 1992 issue of Kalmiopsis. He earned his Ph.D. from OSU after pursuing further research on Lomatium bradshawii and techniques of population viability analysis.

Tom worked for the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s (ODA) Native Plant Conservation Program for several years and was involved with the NPSO/ODA internship program. After the IAE became operational, Tom continued to devote efforts towards training the next generation of biologists with an extensive internship program that NPSO supports philosophically and financially. Since 1993, about 44 budding botanists have benefited from NPSO’s sponsorship of their internships.