The week of June 6th brought strong winds to the east coast along with the 2nd annual workshop meeting of Billion Oyster Projects Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (BOP CCERS) project members. This was a weeklong series of events and meetings in NYC that gave project leaders both a chance to reflect on the year's achievements and to tweak project goals for the third, and final year of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project.

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I attended the biennial National Water Quality Monitoring Conference in Tampa, Florida from Monday, May 2nd through Friday, May 6th. This was my first time attending the conference and by the end, I realized it was a conference I want to attend many times again. The 2016 conference was held at the Tampa Convention Center, a large complex on the waterfront, with nearby hotels and restaurants for attendees.

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After our first stakeholder workshop at INEA on Monday April 25th, Bill Dennison, Dave Nemazie, and I had to prepare for our expanded workshop of 200 people on Friday April 29th, at the Museum of Tomorrow. This meeting brought together stakeholders from all around Guanabara Bay, and served to not only discuss the report card, but also to talk about governance, management, and restoration in the Bay. The team outside the Museum of Tomorrow. Participants at the workshop.

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This month, the Chesapeake Bay Program Creative Team hosted a one-day symposium on all things web for an audience of friends and colleagues. Known as WebStock, the annual event was revitalized last spring as a way for the Creative Team to introduce others to the work they do and the methods they use to do it. Indeed, participants gained an understanding of how the Creative Team can help them and how they can use the team’s own tools and processes to improve their work.

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The Integration and Application Network (IAN) staff recently completed teaching a new course in Science Visualization. This course was part of the Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Science (MEES) Program through the University System of Maryland. Praxis, the word that Aristotle used to mean "thoughtful, practical doing", refers to the emphasis that this course had on developing the practical skills of science visualization.

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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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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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The … Five IAN workshop components: 1. Workshop preparation. Workshop preparation is important, but often overlooked. Preparation includes carefully formulating a list of invitees well in advance in order to maximize participation of key people. An attempt is usually made to assemble a diverse set of participants to ensure diverse input and to avoid leaving out potential detractors. It is generally better to have detractors in the room than outside undermining the effort.

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In March, Bill Dennison, Simon Costanzo, and I travelled to Norman, Oklahoma for a workshop on ecological drought, part of an ongoing project with the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center. This was the third in a series of eight workshops to be held at each of the nation’s eight Climate Science Centers focusing on ecological drought.

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