On October 28th, 2018 Simon Costanzo and I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, for the beginning of a busy week of workshops and trainings. Healthy Rivers for All (a collaborative effort between the UMCES Integration and Application Network and the World Wildlife Fund) has been facilitating the creation of a river basin health report card for the Tuul River Basin, the major river running through the capital of Mongolia.

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Towards the end of April and into the beginning of May, I took a trip up the East Coast to attend the 2018 Local Solutions: Eastern Climate Preparedness Conference in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. The conference was one I had heard about somewhat serendipitously through the Bay Brief (a weekly newsletter produced by the Chesapeake Bay Program) and my mother around the same time.

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The bi-annual conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) took place November 5-9, 2017, in Providence, Rhode Island. I was able to attend in order to present about a paper that I co-authored with multiple colleagues from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), as well collaborators from other institutions. This paper is called New York Harbor: Resilience in the Face of Four Centuries of Development.

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As the only two Science Communication Assistants on the Integration and Application Network’s little team, it was a great feeling for Emily Nastase and I to venture out on our own and attend a workshop in New York City in search of new ways to present data and expand our science visualization toolboxes. The workshop fell on Monday, August 21st - the same day as the eclipse! - down in Midtown Manhattan, at the Dolby Theatre on 54th St.

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Similar to a good Halloween costume, you want any map you create to convey a clear and understandable message that it doesn’t take long for the viewer to digest. Someone viewing your map should not need to take more than a minute or two to understand it’s purpose. Also similar to a Halloween costume, the big winners in map creation pay very close attention to detail. Halloween Google Maps costume. Credit:

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On Wednesday, August 24th a group of technical experts, stakeholders and communicators met at the Chesapeake Bay Program in an attempt to make some sense of the current knowledge about the influence of the Susquehanna River reservoir system on Chesapeake Bay water quality. The group that gathered in Eastport on this temperate August day was a diverse one, although almost everyone in the room had been involved with Susquehanna River management and/or research for a number of years.

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On Friday, June 10th, Judy O’Neil and I participated in the second annual Billion Oyster Projects Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (BOP CCERS) - Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education (STAM) Research Symposium on Governors Island.

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The week of June 6th brought strong winds to the east coast along with the 2nd annual workshop meeting of Billion Oyster Projects Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (BOP CCERS) project members. This was a weeklong series of events and meetings in NYC that gave project leaders both a chance to reflect on the year's achievements and to tweak project goals for the third, and final year of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project.

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On Friday, June 19th, Judy O’Neil, Suzi Spitzer and I had our final exciting stop on a three-day trip to New York City that so far had been lively, productive, and engaging. This was the day of the inaugural BOP STEM Symposium out at Governors Island, what was to be a massive gathering of middle and high school students, teachers, and partners on the STEM project. This event helped to finally put some faces (all smiles) to the work that we have been doing over the past few months.

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On June 17th and 18th, Judy O’Neil, Simon Costanzo, Suzi Spitzer and I traveled north to New York City to attend a series of meetings and events leading up to the inaugural Billion Oyster Project Symposium. This very productive trip will be split into two blog posts, one for the first two days of events, talks, and meetings, and another for the official Billion Oyster Project Science, Technology,Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Symposium on Friday, June 19th.

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