Understanding resilience to climate change effects is critical to the future of environmental assessment and reporting. Changing air and water temperature, precipitation patterns and storm frequencies, CO2 concentrations, and sea level rise will add significant pressure to the natural and engineered systems that provide us services. Understanding system resilience to these changes is important to developing relevant monitoring, assessment, and reporting frameworks.

Alex Fries and I had the chance to represent UMCES at the Conference on Ecosystem and Ecological Restoration (CEER) on the New Orleans riverfront from July 28 to August 1, 2014. I presented on our … Alex Fries at the UMCES booth … CEER Conference a good venue for the Mississippi Report Card … There could not have been a more appropriate location to talk about a report card for the Mississippi River than New Orleans, Louisiana this July.

‘Scientists who made a difference’ series … This blog accompanying the biographical sketch of Isaac Newton looks at a selection of his writing as poetry and a selection of his scientific sketches as art. The ‘Poetry” uses Newton’s exact words (translated into English from the Latin text) in prose form to focus on the cadence and word choice.

‘Scientists who made a difference’ series … Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the same year that Galileo Galilei died. He was born in a modest farmhouse in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, just north of London. His father died before he was born and his mother remarried when Isaac was three years old and she left him to be cared for by his maternal grandmother. When Isaac was ten years old, his step-father died and his mother moved back with three younger half-siblings.

Recently IAN was asked to attend and present at the 16th Consultative Committee Meeting on Large Marine Ecosystems and Coastal Partners in Paris, France. I was lucky enough to be the one from IAN chosen to participate and I absolutely loved it! It’s unusual these days to attend a meeting and not know anyone, but this was the case for me at the UNESCO headquarters in the Invalides district of Paris.

An interest to support community-based monitoring efforts around Long Island Sound motivates IAN’s work to develop a set of ecosystem report cards for that region. Long Island Sound is an estuarine embayment on the northeast coast of the United States, located directly east of New York City. The western portion of the Sound connects with the East River and New York harbor.

On July 8, I attended a meeting organized by the Chesapeake Bay Program office and chaired by Joe Gill, Chair of the Principal Staff Committee and Maryland Secretary of Natural Resources. It was held on Wye Island on Maryland's Eastern Shore at a DNR conference center. The chairs of the six Goal Implementation teams, the leadership of the Chesapeake Bay Program were invited and the coordinators of the goal teams joined at lunch.

At the Integration and Application Network, we have been developing video techniques for science communication. Most of our science communication has focused on print and web media, and we have recently begun developing video products. In the course of developing video products, we have been developing a variety of techniques which will be outlined here. Seminars:

Over the past several weeks, I encountered various tributes to Rachel Carson (1907-1964), the environmental champion and author. It began in Pittsburgh, PA near where Rachel was born in 1927 and where she attended what is now Chatham University. I attended the River Rally, where Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke about how courageous Rachel was to draw attention to the dangers of DDT and the vicious attacks that she received as a result.

On April 29, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio for the National Water Quality Monitoring Conference. This year’s theme for the conference was Working Together for Clean Water, a true issue IAN tackles in almost all of our projects. Alex Fries in Cincinnati, Ohio for the National Water Quality Monitoring Conference. After meeting with Julie Vastine from Dickenson College, she asked me to attend the Volunteer Monitoring Gathering and Dinner.