Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2018 - 8

Society Reports
election. The table above outlines the trends over the last four
elections.
Although reminders were sent twice from the Elections Online website, the number of voters overall decreased.
The results of this election were emailed to the membership
and via NHCOLL-L by the Elections Committee chair in
January 2018.
Respectfully submitted,
Bethany Palumbo, Chair

Emerging Professionals
Our committee launched a survey in
mid-January to get to know our members better. We want to learn how many
are still students, how many are doing
internships/fellowships, if they have
jobs, if they attend SPNHC meetings,
and whether they would like to become
more involved with our committee. We
are also interested in knowing which
countries represent our membership and
which areas are underrepresented. Our
goal is to provide a better service to our
emerging professionals and to diversify
our membership, so that we can hear
from voices from all around the globe
and boost international collaborations.
Conversations have started with the
LOC in Dunedin, New Zealand, to organize our EPC Luncheon during the SPNHC+TDWG 2018 meeting. We will
keep you posted!
We are still seeking blog authors! If you would like to write a
blog post for "Cracking the Collections," please contact us at
spnhcepg@gmail.com
We are also seeking members of the committee who would
like to be more actively involved. Our plans for 2018 involve
expanding our membership, producing blog posts, and finding better ways to connect with our emerging professionals in
order to provide them with the support they need. If you are
interested, please email us or contact us through social media!
And don't forget to follow us!
https://twitter.com/spnhcepc
https://www.facebook.com/groups/spnhc.epg/
Respectfully submitted,
Kari Harris and Mariana Di Giacomo, Co-chairs
8 * SPNHC Connection

Legislation and Regulations
The Legislation and Regulations Committee has seen quite a bit of activity
over the last six months.
CITES/USFWS - In an August 2017
letter (resubmitted from 2014), the Ornithological Council (OC), the American Society of Mammologists (ASM),
and SPNHC jointly filed a Petition for
Rulemaking to the US Secretary of the
Interior regarding challenges with the
validation of export permits (or rather
lack of validation) for CITES-listed
specimens for scientific research. The
USFWS responded that it is in the
process of making revisions and updates
to their CITES regulations (50 CFR 23)
and has considered the comments in the August 2017 letter.
The USFWS will submit a proposed rule to the Federal Register for comments. When the proposed rule is published, the
Legs & Regs Committee will work with the OC and the ASM
to draft additional comments for submission.
US Clean Water Rule - Many thanks to Matt Brown, chair
of the US Federal Collections Committee, for drafting a
joint letter from SPNHC and the Natural Science Collections
Alliance (NSCA) in response to the proposed repeal of the
Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water rules. The
August 2017 letter opposed the proposal to repeal the 2015
Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Clean Water Rule
(CWR).
DSI - In September 2017, a letter was submitted by SPNHC
to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity
commenting on the Secretariat's April 25, 2017 notification
regarding "any potential implications of the use of digital
sequence information on genetic resources for the three
objectives of the Convention, and for the objective of the
Nagoya Protocol, respectively." The letter stated that "[w]
e are extremely concerned that the motion to include digital
sequence under the scope of the Nagoya Protocol would be
counterproductive, making information unavailable for global
scientific access and threatening basic progress regarding our
understanding of the natural world."
Access Benefit Sharing - A number of our committee members, including lead author Dirk Neumann, published a paper
in Organisms Diversity & Evolution in November 2017, summarizing "recent developments resulting from the entering
into force of the NP on Oct 12, 2014, the European regulation
(EU) No. 511/2014 on ABS, and how they will impact on
natural history collections and biodiversity research globally
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2018
