President’s 2017 Leadership Award
The Soil and Water Conservation Society awarded the 2017 President’s Leadership Award to Lois Wright Morton, professor emeritus of sociology at Iowa State University at their 72nd international conference, Creating Pathways to Sustainability held in Madison, Wisconsin. This award is given in recognition of exemplary assistance to the President in helping to carry out the goals and objectives of SWCS. Dr. Wright Morton proposed, organized, and provided guidance for the publication of two special issues of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation: “Climate Change and Agriculture” in 2014 and “Sustainable Corn Production Systems” in 2017. These well-received issues brought together the findings from work completed by 11 institutions as part of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Climate and Corn-based Cropping System Coordinated Agricultural Project. In addition to coordinating submission of research manuscripts for peer review, Morton recruited a diverse group of feature authors to provide valuable insight on the impacts and future direction of climate and agriculture research. Publication of the special issues helped to maintain SWCS’s reputation as a publisher of the latest research on major conservation topics and also contributed to increases in journal citations and readership.