The theme of this year’s Ecological Society of America (ESA) Annual Meeting is Earth Stewardship: Preserving and Enhancing the Earth's Life-Support Systems. The main objective of this meeting is to find simultaneous solutions to a suite of interconnected problems that threaten the ability of the earth to provide the services and resources on which we depend. This will require integration of knowledge from the local to the global scale, from the sciences, humanities, and engineering, and from sources ranging from traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples to the most modern technological advances.