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May 9, 2012

Samoa State of the Environment 2012

Developing an environmental assessment framework in the Pacific In collaboration with the Secretariat for Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), Heath Kelsey, Tracey Saxby, and Adrian Jones traveled to Samoa (Tracey and Adrian will be there until the end of this month) to help develop an environmental assessment framework for Pacific Island Countries. This current work [...]

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April 18, 2012

Chesapeake Bay 2011 report card release at Baltimore Harbor

The following remarks were made at the 17 April 2012 release of the Chesapeake Bay report card: Welcome to the 2011 Chesapeake Bay report card release. My name is Bill Dennison, and I am with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science or UMCES. For the past six years, a group of scientists associated [...]

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April 5, 2012

Assessing the vulnerability of the Great Barrier Reef to climate change

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is an organization which funds research that protects and preserves the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in the face of climate change. The Foundation convened a workshop to develop a synthetic publication that charts the vision for assessing the vulnerability to climate change. The Great Barrier Reef components used in this [...]

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April 3, 2012

Environmental report card workshop in Surfers Paradise, Australia

Sponsored by the Australian Water and Environmental Research Alliance (AWERA), a workshop on environmental report cards was held near Brisbane, Australia. This workshop focused on how environmental report cards have emerged as a technique to integrate data and provide feedback to a wide range of stakeholders as to the ecosystem health of a particular region. [...]

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April 2, 2012

Streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region

In March, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey, and I traveled to Nadi, Fiji to facilitate a workshop  aimed at streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region. The 2010 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ and Forum Economic Ministers’ directive on reporting acknowledged the need to streamline global, regional and national reporting to reduce the reporting burden at the [...]

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January 13, 2012

Developing a Gulf of Mexico report card

Our IAN group likes to tackle large complex projects on iconic ecosystems, while working with interesting and knowledgeable people. We love the immersive learning that comes with challenging projects and good teams. The Gulf of Mexico report card project is one of those exciting projects on an iconic ecosystem with a good team. My first [...]

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January 11, 2012

Report card days of Christmas

As part of the Gulf of Mexico Summit, we had the opportunity to present our prototype report card. For the presentation of the prototype Gulf of Mexico report card, we assembled our six man report card team: Drs. Larry McKinney and Wes Tunnell from the Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University, Drs. Mark Harwell and [...]

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January 9, 2012

Gulf of Mexico Summit 2011

The Summit Earlier this month I got to participate in what everyone hopes is a seminal moment for the future of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Summit 2011 brought together invitees from scientific, academic, government, industry, NGO, and environmental law communities in the region for 5 days in Houston, Texas in early December. Over [...]

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June 8, 2011

Developing a Swan River report card

The Swan-Canning River is the estuary adjacent to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and its seaport, Fremantle at the mouth. The Swan is famous for its iconic black swans and has dolphins that regularly swim up to the foreshore of the central business district of Perth. It supports seagrasses (black swan food), prawns and [...]

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May 13, 2011

Stoplight colors for environmental report cards

The use of red, yellow and green for denoting different levels of concern in environmental report cards has its origin in human perceptions of color. The color red is associated with blood and fire, which are instinctively perceived as ‘danger’. Red is classified as a ‘warm’ color and infrared light is essentially heat. The color [...]

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