We recently (1-2 October 2014) launched the draft Mississippi River report card in Louisville, KY as part of the America's Watershed Initiative Summit. The process of developing the report card is depicted in the following poem I wrote for the occasion. We started out in St. Louis, Missouri … We set the goal--a watershed report card … We figured, it can't be too hard … But we were tackling the entire Mississippi!

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One of the things I love most about my job is that I’m constantly learning about different places, working with local experts that share their knowledge and passion for the place they live, and the science they do. Right now I’m learning about the Willamette River in Oregon, as the IAN team is working in partnership with Meyer Memorial Trust to develop an Ecosystem Health Report Card for the main stem of the Willamette.

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Heath Kelsey, Bill Nuttle, Caroline Donovan, Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Louisville, KY on the banks of the Ohio River to participate in the 2014 America's Watershed Initiative Summit. This Summit represented the culmination of a series of basin workshops and a concerted effort by IAN Science Integrators, Science Communicators, and Science Communication Interns to determine indicators, access indicator data and calculate scores.

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I traveled to Kansas City, Missouri August 26, 2014 to facilitate a workshop in the Missouri River Basin, as part of the Mississippi River Report Card project with America’s Watershed Initiative. This meeting, held at the Kansas City Airport Hilton, was a follow-up to the May 23 meeting we had in Rapid City, South Dakota, where we got a good start on conceptualizing issues and concerns in the basin.

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In conjunction with our work on the Long Island Sound embayment report cards, I was invited to speak about report cards at the first annual Connecticut Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Conference. The conference was held on July 25th, 2014 at Goodwin College. The organizers of the conference were Jacqueline Talbot with the Connecticut River Watershed Council and Meghan Ruta with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP).

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Understanding resilience to climate change effects is critical to the future of environmental assessment and reporting. Changing air and water temperature, precipitation patterns and storm frequencies, CO2 concentrations, and sea level rise will add significant pressure to the natural and engineered systems that provide us services. Understanding system resilience to these changes is important to developing relevant monitoring, assessment, and reporting frameworks.

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Alex Fries and I had the chance to represent UMCES at the Conference on Ecosystem and Ecological Restoration (CEER) on the New Orleans riverfront from July 28 to August 1, 2014. I presented on our … Alex Fries at the UMCES booth … CEER Conference a good venue for the Mississippi Report Card … There could not have been a more appropriate location to talk about a report card for the Mississippi River than New Orleans, Louisiana this July.

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As part of the Mississippi River report card process, we held a workshop at the Mayo Hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma to discuss the Arkansas and Red River basins. I adapted the Rogers and Hammerstein classic "Oklahoma" to commemorate our workshop. Based on some karaoke singing in the evening of the first day of the workshop, we discovered some (not a lot, but some) singing talent within our group. We prevailed upon these karaoke singers to form a trio known as "J.D. and the River Rats".

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Along with Caroline Wicks from the Integration and Application Network, I attended the release of the 2013 Baltimore Harbor report card on 28 May. The Integration and Application Network team developed the initial report card a couple of years ago, working closely with the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore and Blue Water Baltimore and still provide data analysis support for the Baltimore Harbor report card.

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The 2013 Chesapeake Bay report card provides an important insight into how stormwater runoff affects the Bay. The contrast between the Upper Eastern Shore report card scores which are degrading over time versus the James River report card scores which are improving over time provides important insights. Both regions experienced intense rainfall in 2013, yet the report card scores responded differently.

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