Rio de Janeiro is a Brazilian State with vibrant cities (including the one with the same name) along the shore of Guanabara Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Guanabara Bay is highly impacted system due to a large population leading to sewage and trash pollution. The State of Rio and State of Maryland have a partnership of learning between their similar bays, Guanabara Bay and Chesapeake Bay, in order to promote opportunities for restoration to achieve economic, social, and environmental benefits.

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative: a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) In March, Simon Costanzo and I traveled to Cambodia for the third workshop in the Linked Indicators for Vital Ecosystem Services (LIVES) Project, an initiative of the Luc Hoffman Institute. This five-day workshop brought us to the province of Kratie, a five-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh.

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The Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve Headquarters is located inside the The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute Campus in Port Aransas, Texas. Credit: richterarchitect.com (top) and K. Dunton/missionaransas.org (bottom) On April 27-28 I participated in another workshop related (indirectly) to the Texas Coast Report Card Pilot Project at Harte Research Institute in Corpus Christi Texas.

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After the first EcoHealth metrics workshop for the Texas Coast pilot project, Bill Dennison and I shared a shuttle to the airport with Porfirio Alvarez, from the University of Tabasco.

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Caroline Donovan and I facilitated a mini-workshop in Charleston, South Carolina this week to advance the NOAA Coral Reef Monitoring Program Report Card Pilot projects in American Samoa and Florida. The meeting went very well – we had some difficult things to work out, and everyone came together to do just that.

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative: a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Don Boesch and I had lunch with our World Wildlife Fund colleagues Carter Roberts and Tom Dillon recently. Carter asked a question that a) we couldn’t answer immediately, and b) stimulated me to think about what makes our partnership unique.

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The long lost Gulf of Mexico Report Card project has been rekindled this week with a pilot project to create EcoHealth metrics for the Texas coast. We hope to scale this up to the rest of the Gulf next (including the parts in Mexico and Cuba).

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative: a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) The word democracy has its origins in a Greek word from the 5th century B.C. Democracy is formed by combining "demos" meaning "the people" with "kratia" meaning "power". Literally translated as power by the people, democracy is the foundation of the modern western political systems.

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative: a partnership between theWorld Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) One of the attributes of report cards that is particularly useful is the ability to view a whole system synoptically. We often refer to this synoptic view as analogous to flying over at a high altitude.

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative:

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