Editor-in-Chief Dr. Robert Hughes receives the Award of Excellence from the American Fisheries Society
Published 09 September, 2022
Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Robert Hughes, received the Award of Excellence at the American Fisheries Society (AFS) 152nd Annual Meeting in Spokane, Washington. AFS President-Elect, Cecil Jennings, and Past-President, Leanne Roulson, presented the award at the final plenary session of the meeting.
The Award of Excellence is presented to a living person for original and outstanding contributions to fisheries and aquatic biology. It is the society’s highest award for scientific achievement.
“Dr. Hughes has over 40 years of experience in sampling and analysing data for fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America,” said President-Elect Jennings. “He received 10 United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (US EPA) awards for best scientific paper or technical contribution and co-authored the best papers in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society in 2008 and Lake & Reservoir Management in 2014.”
Hughes received his BA and MS degrees from the University of Michigan and his PhD from Oregon State University. He has held numerous faculty positions, most notably visiting senior scientist at the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil in 2010, guest professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria in 2012, and chairs the Advisory Committee of the FLUVIO River Restoration and Management Program at the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal (2014-present). He is Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal, Water Biology & Security, a fellow of both the American Fisheries Society and the Society for Freshwater Science. Hughes served on the advisory committees of the Benthological Society of Asia (2014-2018) and the National Ecological Observatory Network (2015-present) and was a member of Oregon’s independent multidisciplinary science team (2004-2016).
Hughes has used his expertise to develop and evaluate indicators for the US EPA’s environmental monitoring and assessment program (EMAP, now called national aquatic resource survey), to evaluate ecoregions, and to generate biological criteria. He also has extensive experience in sampling and analysing sedimentary diatom, zooplankton, and periphyton assemblage data. His experience includes sampling in small streams and ponds, as well as the Great Lakes and large navigable rivers.
Hughes was a key member of the research team that developed and field-tested the ecoregion concept that led to the map of the ecoregions of the United States. He co-chaired the National Workshop on Instream Biological Monitoring and Criteria in 1987, co-authored US EPA's rapid bioassessment protocols for fish and benthic macroinvertebrates in 1989 and its EMAP field protocols for fish assemblages and fish tissue in 2006 and provided technical expertise to the US EPA's steering committee on biological criteria 1988-1990.
Hughes has edited six books, authored over 270 peer-reviewed publications, and has been a guest speaker over 75 times in Asia, Australia, Europe and South America. He was the 2013-2014 President of the American Fisheries Society. Hughes received the 2006 Environmental Stewardship Award from the North American Benthological Society, the 2011 Fisheries Worker of the Year Award and the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFS Oregon Chapter, a 2013 AFS Distinguished Service Award, and three fulbright scholarships.
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