 So next up, we have Zaboui speaking and he is a past president for Kentucky Native Plant Society and the past executive director for Kentucky Nature Preserves and he will be presenting the Kentucky Native Plant Society Conservation Award. So take it away, Zab. All right, thank you, Hattie. So when I got the email about the conservation award nominations were open, I sent Dr. Martin's name in immediately, because I don't think that William H. Martin has done, he's done more for conservation, I think, than anybody else in Kentucky over the decades. And so I'm going to give you a very, very brief rundown of some of his accomplishments. I'm going to leave out a lot because we're not going to be here all day. We got a time limit. I'll start at the beginning though. He is a Tennessee native from West Tennessee, got his undergrad at Tennessee Tech and his PhD from UT. We won't hold that against him because he moved to Kentucky a long time ago. He was involved at EKU as a professor of biology from 1969 to 2006 with a break in there that I'll bring up in just a second. He developed and taught about a dozen courses in general ecology, plant ecology, environmental sciences, environmental ethics. He began the university's division of natural areas and his research over the years focused on the old growth at Lily Cornette Woods, which was very significant, beginning in the 1970s. He was involved with multiple academic associations. He was in a with the Association of Southeastern Biologists. But also he published, edited many, many research papers over the years and he volume biodiversity of the southeastern United States, lowland terrestrial communities, up the terrestrial communities and aquatic communities. But starting right away with his academic career, he also began a career in public conservation, which to me is the real nuts and bolts of actually conserving things that we value is land protection and physically protecting those populations from being bulldozed or otherwise destroyed. He was very instrumental in the formation of Kentucky's chapter of the Nature Conservancy in the 1970s. He was also involved with the Kentucky River Authority and several other public conservation organizations. But my opinion that was from 1992 to 1998, he was commissioner of the State Department for Natural Resources and a significant part of that job was spearheading the creation of the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund, which hopefully you are all familiar with, Norm mentioned it earlier and I believe Tara did as well. The KHLCF is the state government's main mechanism for funding, the protection, the purchase, the management and the inventory of natural areas in the state of Kentucky. And without Dr. Martin, that fund would not exist today. It has protected over 77,000 acres, ranging from very small municipal parks that you can take your kids to play around in the creek like I do, to nature preserves and management areas that are thousands of acres, including significant areas such as Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve, Bad Branch State Nature Preserve, which were cooperative projects with the Heritage Land Fund, Kentucky Natural Land Trust, the Nature Conservancy. Without the KHLCF, the state of Kentucky would not be able to facilitate the protection of all those properties and you'd be used as matching funds for countless other properties. So those 77,000 acres involved tremendous number of rare populations that the Office of Nature Preserves works on today. Another significant thing as part of the KHLCF is it was Dr. Martin's insistence that every one of those properties undergoes a biological inventory. And so over the years, Dr. Ron Jones conducted quite a few of those, Julian Campbell conducted quite a few of those, but in the last few years, the Tara and Heidi and Nature Preserves has taken over that role and found countless populations of rare plants, rare animals, other species on a protected area, populations that were not known before and because the KHLCF funded those inventories, they are identified and then managed because Dr. Martin also insisted on management being a part of these land acquisition, not to just purchase them and let them go, but to actually manage the populations that are found, including invasive species protection. So I first started working for Dr. Martin when he was chairman. Dr. Martin was chairman from 1994 until his retirement from that position in 2013. So when he retired, there was about 77,000 acres protected. It is increased to Dr. Martin, the main priority was invasive species management and educating the local governments that were involved, the county and city government parks on the importance of invasive species management. Dr. Martin has always focused on the nuts and bolts, the practical aspects of conservation, which I obviously really appreciated working with over the year. He was always extremely practical when I would come with some crackpot idea of changing something or other. He always listened. He usually would let me try it. Sometimes he wouldn't, but he always was willing to be practical, to move forward conservation in Kentucky, realizing that some things you had to fight for to get accomplished. So having said all that, I know Dr. Martin is in on this khadi or somebody else to try to bring him on because that's beyond me. I am going to share a picture if I can, if I can figure out how. Of Dr. Martin that really exemplifies what I'm talking about and that is, this is Dr. former governor, Brad and Jones, who is governor when the HLCF was created. This is an example of him speaking to someone with no background on conservation and native plants and all the things that we care about and really getting them to understand the importance of it and moving forward on something as important as on the ground conservation. So I'm going to turn it back over to Heidi and meet myself. So I believe Dr. Martin is unmuted if you wanted to say anything, Dr. Martin. I am so humbled by and appreciative of this award and appreciative of those kind words that I really don't know whether I deserve or not. I was the chairman of the board and certainly was involved with creating the fund. It was a pleasure to have been in the state of Kentucky and excuse me, being the state of government during that time, and it was professionally the most important thing that I've ever done. There's no question about that, that in watching this today and I've been here from the very beginning, I am just floored by the kind of progress that has been made during the time that I've been in Kentucky and during the time that I've known Alan weekly. I've known Alan for a very long time, many, many years and so it was good to see him and hear what is being done with the southeastern floor and especially what he had the kind of information that is being developed here that years ago would not even been considered. I was also most interested in what Paris presentation was with respect to the nature preserves, which I can remember as well in 1976 we helped to establish that and I was involved in trying to get it through the legislature as a nature preserves commission and then it becomes the office of nature preserves much later during Zeb's time with nature preserves, but I can remember as well when I don't want to dwell too much on this kind of thing because people get tired of listening to old people talk about how they can remember this and that and the other, but I do remember when there were two people that constituted the office of nature preserves and from there it has grown to the kind of operation that it is today and the kind of information that is being gathered, disseminated, that is being presented to the public, it's just absolutely amazing to me and I'm so pleased that this has occurred because Kentucky is a center of biological diversity of the eastern United States. The forests of Kentucky are extraordinarily diverse and important, they're under a considerable amount of siege right now from not only invasive species, but habitat loss, conversion, the decline in oak, which is something that is a great concern as far as economics is viewed and all and ecologically as well, what is happening with these particular species that costs to the dominance of the forest, the dominance that are in the forest today and how the forest is changing, but it's very slow of course. And then of course with climate change, what is going to happen with climate change? I personally think that it's going to be involved with drought here in the center of the United States that drought is going to be a feature that is going to be in the long term extraordinarily important and so it has been wonderful for me to be able to see all this conservation effort occurring and for the number of people that are involved with conservation today, the 120 participants that are associated with the symposium today, I'm reading this right. And so the native plant society is extraordinarily important to conserving and preserving these native plants and it is a wonderful effort because the plants are not living out here digitally. They're living out here in the natural world where the pressures on them are considerable and several and so I look forward to seeing more advances in the short time left to me. Once again, I greatly appreciate this award and thank you for listening to me and enjoyed being on the program today and listening to everyone. And once again, Zib, thank you so much for putting this together and I greatly appreciate it.