On May 20th, 2017, two former students of Michael Kemp, Jeremy Testa and Cassie Gurbisz, surprised him with a retirement party. For the venue, they chose the the pavilion at Horn Point Laboratory, which is part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. His son Cullen Murray-Kemp and daughter-in-law Marissa Joiner drove up from Charleston, South Carolina to surprise him.

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Dr. Don Boesch, President of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Image credit: Baltimore Sun … We had two very nice events to celebrate Don Boesch’s twenty seven year career as President of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The first was held on June 1 at the Institute of Marine Environmental Technology in Baltimore with some 300 people attending. It featured many speeches and testimonials and was a grand event.

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In April I travelled to China to discuss report cards with WWF China. Following the workshop (outlined in a previous blog), I was extremely lucky to be taken on a guided tour of the Three Gorges Dam that spans the Yangzte River in Hubei Province. Now this ain’t just any dam, it’s the biggest hydroelectricity generating dam in the world with a capacity of 85 terrawatt hours per year, or a 10th of China’s whole energy budget! Can you imagine?!

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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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A new paper on Chesapeake Bay Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) was published last week by colleagues from the Virginia Institute of the Marine Science (VIMS) and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, led by Jon Lefcheck (VIMS). This paper, entitled "Multiple stressors threaten the imperiled coastal foundation species eelgrass (Zostera marina) in Chesapeake Bay, USA" was published in Global Change Biology.

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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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At the end of the Ecodrought workshop in Raliegh, North Carolina, I sang the song 'Carolina in my Mind', adapted from song of the same name written by a North Carolina native, James Taylor. The people named in my version of the song are Cari Furiness, North Carolina State University, Ryan Boyles and Jerry McMahon, US Geological Survey. The lyrics to the song are the following:

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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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