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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Last December 2016, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey and I teamed up with our partners at Future Earth’s Coasts, Martin LeTissier and Shona Paterson, to facilitate the Synthesis Workshop for the 13 Belmont Forum funded transdisciplinary projects in Coastal Vulnerability and Freshwater Security. During that time, Bill’s awesome songs were not the only ones that were produced; we also co-developed a draft Synthesis document with all the participants.

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Dave Helweg and Christian Giardina organized a field trip on the Big Island of Hawai'i immediately following our workshop on Oahu. When the plane that Simon Costanzo and I were on landed in Hilo, Christian contacted us to inform me that his wife, Ingrid Dockersmith, had sailed with me aboard the R/V Westward as part of Sea Semester. I was the Chief Scientist and Ingrid was an Assistant Scientist when we left from Maine and sailed to Barbados, Bequia and eventually St.

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I enjoyed the University of Hawaii campus. We used the food trucks for lunch on the first day, and ate at the campus food court on the second day. After the first day of the workshop, we enjoyed sitting outside at the campus pub, drinking local Kona Longboard beer and listening to the mynah birds in the trees. The sound of the mynahs and the sight of pandanus trees made me recall my stint at the University of Queensland.

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On 7-8 March, Simon Costanzo and I facilitated an ecodrought workshop at the University of Hawaii at the main campus in Manoa, a suburb of Honolulu. Our host was the Pacific Islands Climate Science Center, headed by Dave Helweg. This Climate Science Center has a huge swath of territory to cover, including American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Guam, Palau and a host of isolated atolls (e.g., Johnstone, Palmyra).

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Simon Costanzo, Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Boise, Idaho for a second workshop with scientists from the Pacific Northwest Climate Science Center. Our first workshop, held in Portland, Oregon, focused on the issues west of the Cascades, and this second workshop focused on issues east of the Cascades. We heard about the three 'W's (wounded wetlands and water rights), the three 'F's (forests, fires and fish) and the three 'A's (acclimation, adaptation and assemblages).

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Brianne Walsh, Simon Costanzo and I traveled to Portland, Oregon to talk about climate change with the USGS Northwest Climate Science Center. This workshop was the sixth in our series of eight workshops we are conducting across the entire United States.

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We recently completed our third SAV SYN workshop, which is an effort to synthesize (SYN) data related to the submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) of Chesapeake Bay. We have been analyzing a variety of data sets to better understand how SAV are responding to changes in the Bay and to understand what we can infer about the progress of Bay restoration activities. This effort is proving to be a productive collaboration among 15 scientists from 5 different institutions.

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Simon Costanzo, Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to meet with scientists associated with the USGS Southeast Climate Science Center to talk about ecological drought on 16-17 November 2016. Fittingly, there were forest fires raging in the Great Smoky Mountains as a result of a prolonged drought as we held the workshop. Forest fires are not common, particularly in November, in the Great Smoky Mountains, in spite of their name.

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On 12 January 2017, I visited Beau Ranheim, the Section Chief of Marine Sciences, New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Beau was a graduate student in the Ed Carpenter/Doug Capone laboratory at Stony Brook University when I was a postdoc in the same laboratory. After Beau finished his Master's program at Stony Brook, he has been working for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

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