Mark your calendar for the 155th Annual Meeting, August 10-14, 2025, in San Antonio! The theme for the 2025 meeting is Headwaters to Saltwater: Understanding the Past, Protecting the Future, 155 Years of AFS. Next year's conference includes the Black Bass Symposium, being held for the first time in 25 years. The meeting website will launch in a few days, while the Call for Sessions will open for submissions on December 6, with session proposals due by January 24, 2025.

Fisheries and aquatic biologists play a critical role in creating environmentally protective hydropower flow requirements that govern flow timing, frequency, magnitude, and rate of change. Hydropower's role in the U.S. electrical grid is expected to evolve in response to increased wind and solar generation as hydropower will be called upon to quickly ramp up and down in response to changes in wind and solar generation. For this reason, hydropower is expected to have increased value as fossil generation is phased out, even as rapid flow fluctuations linked with hydropower flexibility may strand fish, alter habitat, and create unsafe recreational conditions.

Known-age reference collections are limited and not publicly available, limiting the ability to train new fisheries professionals. Collectively, this gap in knowledge and opportunity may continue to foster poor age estimation practices and lead to widespread mismanagement for both exploited fisheries and native species in need of conservation. FishAge.org was created to be a publicly available reference database that stores and displays known-age fish structures. 

For a limited time, take advantage of the AFS Office Surplus sale to purchase two book titles at steep discounts:

• Advances in Understanding Landscape Influences on Freshwater Habitats and Biological Assemblages, and
• Freshwater, Fish and the Future: Proceedings of the Global Cross-Sectoral Conference.

Limited quantities available. Sale ends December 2. All orders will ship during the first week of December.

We are looking for your input for two important surveys by the end of November:

•  All Member Survey (~10 min) - this survey will be a primary way that we understand values and perspectives of conference attendees to communicate with leadership about priorities and programming.
•  AFS Mentor Map (<5 min) - this (very quick!) survey will help us understand connectivity and centrality of AFS membership. Although similar to an "academic family tree," this map is aimed at understanding which folks within an organization serve as hub "nodes" for linking folks and are most likely to serve as entry points to long-term engagement with the society. So, although your primary mentors may be or have been formal advisors, we encourage you to consider informal mentors in responding to this survey.

At this point, this map will remain anonymous (no individual names will be connected to network maps). In future years, we aim to expand the map's utility. The researchers will, however, share the final visualize and summary statistics with the AFS membership at large (again, with names excluded).

Feel free to reach out to SySTEM BIO-LEAPS leadership with further questions.