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February 10, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 7- Examples of Flooding in the United States

Let me talk about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in southern Louisiana. It was scheduled that some Louisiana people were going to come up to work with us the day that Katrina hit, then we re-scheduled for us to go down to Louisiana the day Rita hit. So we decided that we’d wait until hurricane season [...]

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February 8, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 6- Global Initiatives in Response to Flooding

Let’s take a trip around the world and look at five examples. I’m going to do two examples from North America that I have been working with; the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, and coastal Louisiana–the mouth of the Mississippi River with marshes and the city of New Orleans. Let’s look at the two [...]

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February 6, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 5- Preparing for Floods

Another legacy of what happened here was the whole idea of healthy waterways, and how that relates to healthy catchments, and healthy parks. In Victoria, their whole catchphrase is healthy parks, healthy people. So they are making the connection between the health of the ecosystem, and human health. One of CSIRO‘s flagships is water for [...]

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February 3, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 4- The Brisbane River Renaissance

One of the issues that has presented itself is that we’ve had a renaissance of the Brisbane River. When I moved here in 1992, I call it the dark ages, because the Brisbane River was the back yard of the buildings. It was being dredged for sand and gravel. Every day there was a coral [...]

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February 1, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 3- History of Flooding in Brisbane

You can take a walk down the street to the Botanic Gardens; you can find a little park there; the Paluma Park. And that’s to commemorate the location where a large gunship washed up into the Botanic Gardens in February, 1893. Interesting story, the Paluma was a gunship that was commissioned by the Queensland government. [...]

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January 27, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 1- Introduction

A seminar entitled ‘Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs’ was presented on 8 July 2011. The seminar was sponsored by the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, and delivered at the historic Customs House in downtown Brisbane, situated along the shore of the Brisbane River. The following fifteen part blog series captures [...]

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January 24, 2012

Nutrient trading in Chesapeake Bay

A recently released policy statement by a group of Senior Scientists and Policymakers provides a review of nutrient trading as a management tool to be used in Chesapeake Bay.  Nutrient trading, the buying and selling of nutrient reduction credits, is a relatively new approach that is being applied to achieve nutrient reductions. There is a [...]

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January 19, 2012

Chesapeake citizens are well informed: New poll results of Maryland public perception of Chesapeake Bay restoration

A group called “Clean water, Healthy families” released the results of a poll of Maryland voters regarding Chesapeake Bay restoration. This poll provided some interesting findings. It was particularly gratifying to see that the public perception of the health of the Bay (average C-) matches EXACTLY with the EcoCheck report card (2010 score = C-). [...]

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February 5, 2011

Discussion following Bob Hirsch seminar on Are we making progress? Interpreting the nutrient flux records for the major rivers flowing to the Chesapeake Bay

This blog post discusses the seminar given by Bob Hirsch of the US Geological Survey (USGS), at the IAN Seminar Series on November 23, 2010. The analytical method used by Bob Hirsch was clarified. Bob explained that he used nutrient concentrations that were estimated daily every day over a 31 year period, and these concentrations [...]

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December 17, 2010

Chesapeake Film Festival

I was asked by Stuart Clarke, Executive Director of Town Creek Foundation, to participate in an energy panel associated with the third annual Chesapeake Film Festival. The panel was held at the historic Avalon Theatre in downtown Easton, Maryland, immediately following the film “On Coal River“. Previously during the festival, two additional films were screened, [...]

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