Annual IAN staff retreat at Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center
Two dozen Integration and Application Network staff gathered on Maryland's Eastern Shore at the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center for our annual retreat. Everyone provided photos and music to introduce themselves to each other, which was important with many new staff having recently joined IAN. We discussed ways to improve the IAN report card scores as well as soliciting suggestions for better indicators and goals for future report card iterations. We did some stakeholder mapping in support of Chesapeake Bay restoration, prioritizing how we can empower, engage, and foster leadership in various sectors. We also discussed the IAN 'brand' by identifying key stakeholders, their goals, and feelings in order for us to develop a suite of potential tag lines to describe our IAN activities. We also took our group photo and enjoyed watching the wildlife at the venue.
IAN and WWF name their partnership "Healthy Rivers for All"
IAN and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) held a two-day retreat May 24-25 at Horn Point Lab. One of the most exciting things on the agenda was creating a new tagline for the partnership, which previously was the "Basin Report Card Initiative." The WWF creative team worked closely with partnership staff to create the new tagline "Healthy Rivers for All," which reflects the imperative to work for healthy rivers for the benefit of people and ecosystems everywhere. We also discussed several new report card projects in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, and explored ways to incorporate climate change and scenario building into the report card process. As always, it was a very productive meeting!
IAN shows support for collaborative public science
IAN staff Caroline Donovan, Alex Fries, and Suzi Spitzer attended the biennial Citizen Science Association Conference from May 17-19. Our work at IAN was well-represented— Caroline co-hosted a data communication workshop, Alex promoted the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative during the Project Slam, and Suzi presented results from her dissertation research. The conference was held in Saint Paul, Minnesota and was attended by citizen science researchers and practitioners from all over the country and across the globe. You can read more about our conference experience in several blog posts!
Yangtze River tributaries likely site for future report cards in China
In April, Simon Costanzo traveled to China with Michele Thieme and Judy Takats from the World Wildlife Fund U.S. (WWF). The trip was planned to discuss, with WWF China, if the IAN report card process would work within the Chinese context. The workshop was held over two days in Wuhan, located at the confluence of the Hanshui and Yangtze Rivers, in Hubei province. Participants included WWF staff and local stakeholders from the China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG), Chinese Sturgeon Research Institute, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, Changjiang Water Resources Commission (CWRC), and the Co-Innovation Center for Social Governance of Urban and Rural Communities in Hubei Province. The consensus from the group was that report cards could work in China and some tributaries of the Yangtze were nominated as suitable to test out the report card concept. The workshop was followed by a tour of the Three Gorges Dam.