Report to BSPP Annual General Meeting 2013
BSPP Board meetings
The Board met four times in 2013 to manage the affairs of the Society, to plan scientific meetings, to agree the policy for the Society’s publications, to agree a budget and monitor income and expenditure, to identify opportunities to promote plant pathology and, generally, to further the interests of the Society and its members.
Board members
· President (Mike Shaw), President Elect (Lesley Torrance). Gary Foster, University of Bristol, was appointed Vice President for 2013.
· Treasurer (Paul Nicholson), Secretary (Roger Williams), Programme Secretary (Steve Whisson), Membership Secretary (Hans Cools).
· Normally 6 representative members are elected by members at large and serve for 3 years. James Fountaine of SRUC and Sian Deller of Syngenta were elected by the membership in 2012 and took over from Ralph Dean and Robert Jackson during 2013.
· In addition, during 2013, Robert Jackson was co-opted onto the Board to assist with continuity in outreach activities and Jack Peart was co-opted onto the Board for a further year as Innovations and Industrial Liaison Officer.
· The Senior Editors of Plant Pathology, Molecular Plant Pathology and New Disease Reports attend Board meetings along with the Newsletter Editor and the Webmanager.
BSPP Finances
BSPP finances are in reasonably good shape. The flow of funds from our journals continues to be very healthy. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, our investment portfolio has continued to perform well despite the uncertain on-going economic conditions. This has enabled us to increase our support for student bursaries and travel by significant amounts over the last year. BSPP has supported undergraduate and MSc bursaries to a sum of over £50,500 in 2013 and provided assistance for travel to conferences to the sum of £30,742 to date.
In addition to these activities, BSPP has been able to continue support for the development of New Disease Reports as a valuable resource to plant pathologists across the globe. BSPP has also committed a sum of £60,000 per annum over three years to develop a new outreach activity to raise the profile of plant pathology to policy makers and the general public.
Despite an increase in the support given to members and other activities such as those mentioned above, BSPP is on track to break even this year.
Management of BSPP
Katie Tomlinson, the Society’s Outreach Officer has been highly effective in promoting plant pathology in schools, colleges and Universities and acting as an ambassador for the BSPP, using science fairs and social media.
The Society’s Administrator, Carol Jenner, has been highly effective in supporting the Secretary, Publicity Officer, Programme Secretary and Outreach Officer with logistics, and acting as a point of contact for BSPP. Both Katie and Carol attend Board meetings.
BSPP Publications
· Plant Pathology
The current Impact Factor score, based on 2012, is 2.729, and is significantly up on the previous year (2.125). This ranks the Journal at 42 out of 195 in the Plant Sciences, up from 57th. Some of this is due to the special issue on climate change from 2011, and also the increased inclusion of review articles. For comparison, The IF for EJPP is 1.610, Plant Disease is now at 2.455 and Phytopathology has increased to 2.968
The Journal continues to make a healthy profit for the Society - £166,735 in the last year.
Plant Pathology was put forward for full review at the February LSTRC (Literature Selection and Technical Review Committee) meeting for PubMed/Medline coverage, but was unsuccessful. We will be allowed to try again in 2 years’ time.
The Plant Pathology Best Student Paper for 2013 was awarded to Belkis Hamed of the University of Basel, Switzerland, for her paper "Generation of pathogenic F1progeny from crosses ofPhytophthora infestansisolates differing in ploidy".
Two virtual issues have been published in 2013 on ‘Diseases of grapevine - diversity, dynamics and control’ and on ‘Dickeya and Pectobacterium diseases, detection and control’.
A number of new editors have joined the Board to replace some retirements.
· Molecular Plant Pathology
In 2013 MPP was awarded an Impact Factor of 3.877. This ranks us 21/195 in the Plant Sciences category.
This year saw the implementation of a new category of article in MPP: the Opinion Piece. This first of these, “Ash Dieback in the UK: A Wake-Up Call” by Steve Woodward was published in MPP 14:9, together with an explanatory Editorial from Marty.
The MPP 2013 best student paper was awarded to Lei Feng for his paper “Inhibition ofin vivoSlicer activity of Argonaute protein 1 by the viral 2b protein independent of its dsRNA-binding function”By Lei Feng, Cheng-Guo Duan and Hui-Shan Guo
· New Disease Reports
Since emergence of New Disease Reports as a stand-alone online journal submission numbers have been declining year on year but 2013 marks the first year that numbers have more or less held up on the previous year. The decline is undoubtedly due to the loss of the Impact Factor in association with Plant Pathology. The outcome of an application for Impact Factor made in 2010 is awaited. On the other hand the rejection rate has declined from around 60% to about 50%, indicating higher quality and more appropriate reports being submitted.
In relation to the current crisis in UK, NDR first published reports on ash dieback (Chalara fraxinea) in Eastern Europe in 2008. This report was quickly taken up in the EPPO Reporting Service, the pathogen having already been put on EPPO’s Alert List the previous year. An NDR editorial was published in May 2013 to highlight the special virtual issue of Plant Pathology on emerging tree diseases.
· Newsletter
Three issues of the BSPP Newsletter were published in 2013, containing general information and updates on the activities of the society and reports prepared from members who received funding through one of the BSPP schemes. The success of the newsletter is, as always, contingent on members continuing to provide interesting articles and content, and your continued help with this is requested.
Scientific conferences and meetings
The Presidential Meeting is the main scientific meeting of the Society and is typically held annually. The society may also hold smaller meetings that cover topics suggested by the Society’s membership and that strongly benefit the membership. This year the BSPP held the ‘Protecting our Woodlands: Tackling Tree Pests and Diseases’ at the University of Reading. This meeting was very well attended, with over 50 delegates attending. Proposals from members for future meetings to be organised by BSPP are very welcome.
The Society also provides financial sponsorship for plant pathology-related meetings organised by members. The upper limit for sponsorship was raised in 2012 from £2000 to £4000. In 2013, there were no BSPP sponsored meetings. Applications from members for conference sponsorship from BSPP should be sent to the President Elect.
Education
The society continues to actively support both undergraduate and postgraduate interests in plant pathology though the funding of bursaries projects supervised by BSPP members. During 2013 there were record numbers of students supported by the scheme, furthermore the board of the society see this as an extremely good use of funds in the support of plant pathology research at the student level and we look forward to supporting more students in 2014.
Fellowship Scheme
This year we supported three fellowships: a senior fellowship was awarded to Dr Riccardo Baroncelli from the University of Warwick to visit Prof Thon in Salamanca, Spain to further his work on comparative genomics of Colletotrichum species. Selin Ozkan a PhD student in Cell and Molecular Biology, Imperial College London working on the effect of virus on RNA silencing in Aspergillus spp is to visit the lab of Professor Tamas Dalmay, JIC Norwich to learn about bioinformatic analysis of her small RNA datasets. We also supported our first Grace Waterhouse Fellow, Susan du Raan, University of Pretoria, South Africa who is studying bacterial diseases of potato to visit James Woodhall, Food & Environment Research Agency to learn about molecular diagnostics. One fellowship application was rejected.
Travel Fund
We continue to support cases judged as appropriate up to a maximum of half the costs of a trip up to a limit of £750. As in previous years, the vast majority of requests have been for conference support. At the time of writing we have allocated £9,107. Applications have come from members from all around the world, with conferences and visits to a wide range of locations, ranging from Europe, North America and South America, to Japan.
The fund provides very valuable support for members to attend a wide variety of conferences and plays a role in ensuring the UK stays abreast of international developments in plant pathology.
Outreach
BSPP Outreach was set up in October 2012 in light of a recent BSPP audit showing a major of loss of plant scientists at various UK institutes. It was decided that given the national agenda for improved food security and crop protection there needs to be an improvement in the visibility of plant pathology issues that will help to underpin teaching and research. The BSPP aims to use outreach to help promote and stimulate interest in plant pathology and consequently improve demand for studying plant pathology.
This year Outreach Officer Katie Tomlinson has developed a range of educational resources and events including: ‘Leafy Murder Mystery’ part of the international Fascination of Plants day; the ‘Plant Doctor’ stand for the Bristol’s Festival of Nature and BBC One Show Summer Festival.
During this time the Outreach Officer was fortunate to have the highly valuable assistance of Claire Stoker, a PhD student at the University of Warwick. Claire completed a three-month internship, in which she successfully helped to put together resources for the events. The BSPP will be running two outreach internships for PhD students in 2014.
In 2014 BSPP outreach events will be expanded to various regions around the UK and will include a stand at the Big Bang Fair. There will also be educational resources for primary, secondary and sixth form level and a careers resource available on the BSPP Outreach pages.
The outreach team are keen to attract BSPP members and others to use resources and deliver activities. Those interested should contact .
Publicity
Amanda Bennett, one of the Elected Board members, took over from Chris Ridout as Publicity Officer for the BSPP in 2013. Our aim is to raise the profile of the Society in the UK and at international meetings.
In 2013, the Society had exhibition stands at the 10th International Congress of Plant Pathology (Beijing, China) and at the American Phytopathological Society - Mycological Society of America Joint meeting (Austin, Texas, USA). We have been developing links with APS over the last few years, and had a live video-link up between members of the APS and BSPP for a panel discussion during this year’s conference. At these meetings, and at other meetings sponsored by BSPP, including “Protecting our woodlands: tackling tree pests and diseases” (University of Reading), delegates were given information about the Society to encourage new membership.
Also in 2013, the BSPP sponsored a lecture at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School; provided promotional material to the Norwich and Cambridge Student Symposium; and had an exhibition stand at the AHDB Crop Research conference “Knowing your enemy – the future of crop protection” (London).
Membership
In 2012 the membership of the Society stood at 647, up from 631 in 2011, up from 645 in 2010 and up from 621 in 2009. Membership is drawn from more than 50 countries.
Honorary Members
Mike Jeger was appointed an Honorary Member with effect from 1 January 2013.
Mike Shaw December 2013
Page 1 of 5