The Biscayne Bay Marine Health Inaugural Summit was held at the Florida International University Biscayne Bay campus. I flew down at the invitation of Jim Fourqurean, my long time friend and seagrass colleague, who provided a very nice introduction. There were around two hundred people in attendance and my role was to provide a lunch time talk to relate some lessons from other locations that were relevant to Biscayne Bay.

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8th World Water Forum Poster. Image credit: Bill Dennison … The Eighth World Water Forum is going to be held in Brazilia, Brazil in March 2018. As a lead up to the World Water Forum, a series of regional events are being held to initiate discussions and create enthusiasm for the World Water Forum. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Coca-Cola Company co-sponsored the Sharing Water event on 5 June 2017 as one of these regional events.

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Last June 5-9, 2017, I was fortunate enough to be selected to participate in SESYNC’s short course on Social Network Analysis (SNA) taught by Lorien Jasny, PhD, who was a postdoc at SESYNC but is now based at Exeter University in the UK. This introduction and crash course on Social Network Analysis was a great opportunity for me, as I will be using SNA in my dissertation research.

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During the week of May 15th, I traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend and present at the 2017 Citizen Science Association Conference. Alex Fries and Suzi Spitzer from IAN also attended the conference. Check out Suzi’s awesome blogs on the conference. St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota and adjoins Minneapolis, which is the largest city in Minnesota. While the combined St. Paul-Minneapolis population is 3.52 million (Wikipedia), St.

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In a previous blog, I suggested six elements for science synthesis that we have employed in the Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Synthesis (SAV SYN) effort. These six elements were the following: • Experienced leadership … • Limited size … • Multiple immersive workshops … • Regular communication … • Flexibility … • Product focus … I also discussed the following enabling conditions:

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We recently gathered the submerged aquatic vegetation synthesis team (SAV SYN) at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Annapolis office. This fourth and final working group meeting was convened to make progress on our two remaining publications, using Structural Equation Modeling (led by Jon Lefcheck) and seagrass trait analysis (led by Chris Patrick). The other major effort was to develop a segment analysis of SAV trends, drivers and factors affecting projections.

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In May I attended the 2017 Citizen Science Association Conference with Caroline and Alex. This blog is the second post about the conference, and the first part can be found here. On the final morning of the conference, I took advantage of the clear skies and dry sidewalks, and woke up early to explore Saint Paul.

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Last month I attended the 2017 Citizen Science Association Conference with Caroline and Alex, from May 17 to 19. The three-day biennial conference was hosted in Saint Paul, Minnesota at the RiverCentre. The conference proved to be very educational and thought-provoking, and I especially appreciated the opportunity to network with other members of the diverse and expanding citizen science community.

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After participating in the March for Science I was hesitant to join in on yet another march in the same week. The March for Science, while inspiring and exciting, was still a very cold, wet, and tiring day. But when I found out that my 86-year-old grandfather wanted to participate in the People’s Climate March, I couldn’t not go.

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Don Boesch … It has been 50 years since I participated in a march in Washington, that time to protest the war in Vietnam. But on Saturday, April 22 I plan on joining tens of thousands of others in the March for Science. This is not an institutional endorsement of the March, but a personal perspective on why I will march. The March for Science sprung up because of concerns that scientific evidence is under attack and critical advances in science might be defunded.

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