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. [...]
Continue Reading »April 3, 2012
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 [...]
Continue Reading »May 31, 2011
Sugar, Coca-Cola, WWF, clickers and scorecards
On May 9, I attended a Project Catalyst Workshop at the Mackay Entertainment and Convention Centre along the Central Queensland coast. The workshop was organized by Will Higham and his colleagues at Reef Catchments, and it included three dozen sugarcane growers from three sugar producing regions within the Great Barrier Reef catchment; Mackay/Whitsunday/Isaac region, Burdekin [...]
Continue Reading »April 20, 2011
TERN, TERN, TERN
Based on a passage from the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes, Bob Seeger combined words and music for the song “Turn, Turn, Turn”, which was popularized by the musical group the Byrds. This song was adapted for the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), based on what we learned at the TERN Symposium 2011. To [...]
Continue Reading »January 13, 2011
Conceptionary in action: Learning through play
One of our favorite teaching modules is about conceptual diagrams, and the activity associated with this module is called Conceptionary. It is a game in which teams of 4-10 people are formed and one team member is designated as the ‘science illustrator’. The ‘science illustrator’ is given a card with an environmental concept explained and [...]
Continue Reading »December 22, 2010
December 21, 2010
December 20, 2010
November 18, 2010
The National Parks of Guam and Saipan
Tim Carruthers and I have just completed two site visits to the War in the Pacific National Historical Park (WAPA) on Guam and the American Memorial Park (AMME) on Saipan. The IAN science communication workshops went really well and the parks’ managers and staff were very excited and engaged in forging two new products, a [...]
Continue Reading »July 9, 2010
The Integration and Application Network ‘tribe’
We recently held our annual Integration and Application Network retreat, titled “Creating synergies and leveraging impacts”. It was conducted at the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology, on the Wye River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay. Attending this retreat were the Science Integrators and Science Communicators from a) the ‘bathhouse’ on the Horn Point Laboratory [...]
Continue Reading »










