Sport Fish Restoration Act: Part 3

I am on a little “rinse and repeat” here with the various pieces from the SFR 50^th Anniversary publication. This part talks about how SFR assisted and shaped the maturation of the fisheries profession from adolescence into adulthood (thanks to AFS Past President Steve McMullin for the analogy!). While I always want you to read these, I think this one is very timely.  I was on a conference call yesterday with my counterparts from The Wildlife Society and the Society for Range Management, and we were contemplating the roles of our Societies in a post-DOGE world. We agreed that, assuming our organizations survive, our roles in the future would be vitally important for the training and development of the next generation of natural resources professionals. The degree of institutional knowledge loss will likely be devastating, and rebuilding the expertise will be heavily dependent on professional societies. As a profession, we have been here before, and the 2^nd paragraph of the article sets the stage for how current times are reflecting the past.

I hope this gets you all to think more about SFR at 75. Many of you who receive this are state agency fisheries managers, and I want to use this space to ask you to consider submitting an abstract for the AFS meeting in San Antonio in August. The meeting will feature a symposium on the 75^th Anniversary of SFR. State agency staff have completed so many great projects, the possibilities are nearly endless. We would love to hear those success stories, and not-so-successful stories from our collective SFR work.