The plenary sessions for the CommOceans conference was in a 100-year old meeting hall. Photo credit: Heath Kelsey … At the recent commOcean2016 conference in Bruges, Belgium, I attended a short discussion session on effective science communication tools and strategies. Although the conversation was not exactly brisk, there was one exchange that triggered a new direction in my thinking about science communication, behavior change, and ecosystem health report cards.

Our Integration and Application Network (IAN) team has been traveling the globe to help various partners develop rigorous report cards. When we starting working with Tina Bishop and Peter Tuddenham from the College of Exploration to develop an evaluation approach for IAN, we realized that using the same process to develop report cards for our own assessment would be a useful way to evaluate ourselves.

Guam is in the western Pacific Ocean, approximately equidistant from Tokyo (north), Manila (west), and Papua New Guinea (south). And, on January 28th, Heath Kelsey, Alex Fries, and I traveled to Guam from Hawaii. Guam is a U.S. territory and is one island in the chain of islands that make up the Mariana archipelago. Guam has a population of approximately 165,000, but with several military bases and a strong tourism business, the number of people on the island can fluctuate significantly. Top:

On February 1st 2017, Heath Kelsey, Caroline Donovan, and I traveled from Guam to our last stop on the Pacific Islands trip, Saipan. Saipan is an island in the Mariana Archipelago, and is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory. Saipan, Rota, and Tinian are the only islands currently inhabited in the Marianas. Flying from Guam to Saipan, we passed over Rota. Photo credit:

As part of the NOAA Coral Reef Report Card Project, Alex Fries, Caroline Donovan, and Heath Kelsey facilitated two workshops in Honolulu to create report cards for the Hawaiian Archipelago and the Remote Islands of the Pacific where NOAA has responsibility for coral reef management and assessment.

At the conclusion of a 9-11 Nov. 2016 workshop in Annapolis titled "Integrating systems modeling and report card development to improve basin health & manage trade-offs". I was able to convince the participants to act out a play that I wrote for the occasion. The play was entitled "Scrooge and the Report Card", loosely based on the classic "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. The list of actors was the following:

On 9-11 November 2016, a workshop entitled "Integrating systems modeling and report card development to improve basin health & manage trade-offs" was held in Annapolis, Maryland. The systems modeling and the report card approach have a shared philosophy of stakeholder engagement as being the foundation to improving river health globally. Both approaches are also driven by synthesis of scientific data.

On December 6th to 7th 2016, Heath Kelsey and I represented the Integration and Application Network (IAN) at the 2nd International Marine Science Communication Conference (CommOcean) in Bruges, Belgium. The conference took place at the Provincial Court on the Market Square in the heart of the medieval Bruges, a historic UNESCO heritage site. It was my first trip to Europe, and my first conference to attend as both an IAN graduate student and session speaker.

The 2016 Upper Mississippi River Basin Conference in Moline, Illinois had a special theme of “Raising the Grade” this year, which was shaped by the Mississippi River Watershed Report Card which UMCES developed with America’s Watershed Initiative last year. The Upper Mississippi River got a “C” grade in the report card, and although the grade was the highest of all the basins, it is not good enough in the eyes of the regional stakeholders.

The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Basin Report Card Initiative (BRCI) partnership visited Monterrey Mexico to attend the opening of the Water Center at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, and to meet with the FEMSA foundation and Water Center about the potential for report cards for the Rio Bravo, Rio Conchos, and Monterrey areas…