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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After participating in the March for Science I was hesitant to join in on yet another march in the same week. The March for Science, while inspiring and exciting, was still a very cold, wet, and tiring day. But when I found out that my 86-year-old grandfather wanted to participate in the People’s Climate March, I couldn’t not go.

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The 2017 annual meeting of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecologists was held in Baltimore at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Inner Harbor. Andrew Elmore, my University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science colleague, invited me to present the banquet keynote. Since any after dinner talk should not be all too serious, Andrew and I opted to develop an interactive session.

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I recently wrote a blog entitled 'Practical visual literacy for science communication', and since narratives and visuals need to be combined for effective science communication, I felt that developing a narrative literacy was also important. The first three narrative literacy principles are derived from Randy Olson's excellent book "Houston, We Have a Narrative", discussed in a previous blog.

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In a paper titled "Visual literacy and science communication", published in the journal Science Communication in 1999, Jean Trumbo uses the writings of Leonardo da Vinci to introduce the concept of visual literacy. Da Vinci called his visualization process "sapere vedere", translated as "knowing how to see". Da Vinci was a master of drawing and sketching in addition to his more famous painting skills (e.g, Mona Lisa, The Last Supper).

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It was a cold and rainy day on Earth Day, April 22, when a contingent of Integration and Application Network (IAN) scientists headed to Washington, D.C. to join the March for Science. The rain couldn't dampen our spirits, as it was heartening to see so many people committed to supporting science. The highlight of the day for me was the camaraderie of the people we encountered throughout the day. Even the Capitol Police were very friendly and helpful.

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Jane (Jano) Thomas was a member of our Marine Botany Group at the University of Queensland. After I left Australia to set up the Integration and Application Network at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in 2002, Jano stayed in Brisbane to finish her Honours thesis on macroalgae. Jano then joined the IAN team in 2003, doubling the staff size, as only Tim Carruthers, who came from Australia with me in 2002 was in residence.

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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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We recently held an open house in our new University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Annapolis Office. We had our guests locate their favorite location on a map of the Chesapeake region, and write three words to describe Chesapeake Bay. We then created a word cloud based on these results. Many of the seventy five people who visited our office for the open house remarked about what great space we had put together.

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