I want to talk about innovations in environmental reporting. One of the things we stumbled upon in Southeast Queensland is environmental report cards, and I got to thinking why they are so powerful. I have two teenage children, who you can definitely see are driven by peer pressure in their everyday life. Peer pressure is a really powerful motivator.

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Another thing that we did was create IAN Press. We’ve created a self publishing kind of approach and what’s cool about it is that this can be full color, 230 pages, and we can sell it for $20 US, and not lose money. We finally have the technology of tablet computers. The tablet version really works because you can scale up images and get a really good look at them. I think that the electronic tablet era is going to be really handy for these kinds of publications.

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I distinguish science communication from science writing. If you think about a science paper, you provide lots of references, which is the scientific context for that study. Science communication provides societal examples, because it's all about context, to make the message translate to a broader audience. In scientific literature, there is usually just text, while in science communication, we try to balance with graphics and use color.

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In the middle of the National Environmental Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) seagrass project, we created the Annapolis Synthesis Center. The UMCES Annapolis Office … Annapolis is much like Santa Barbara, it's a cute town that you can walk around in, fly in without getting in a car, and it's the capital of Maryland as well as home to the U.S. Naval Academy.

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At the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, we formed a seagrass working group, recruiting colleagues to help populate a global database of seagrass trajectories. We focused on what we could document in terms of seagrass area, density, biomass and cover. Seagrass working group at NCEAS … And then we used that database, interrogated it and wrote scientific papers. The first thing we saw, as expected, was that seagrass is being lost, globally.

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The synthesis I want to talk about is that synthesis that leads to environmental outcomes, so this isn't just writing books and papers for colleagues, it is taking that next step to generate environmental outcomes in terms of policy, in terms of planning, in terms of implementation and in terms of directing our resources towards making maximum benefit of our available environmental dollars.

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I want to talk about innovations in environmental synthesis, reporting and governance and how these innovations apply to the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network in Australia. And I'll start by explaining a little bit about where I'm currently based at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. We are right on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, in the vicinity of Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland.

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Holidays are when we really catch up with family, and the "How's work?" question is inevitable. If you're lucky, a few family members are even interested in your reply, but we all know that's rare. I'm excited about what we do at IAN, but most of the time only a few of my family really want to get into it.

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I recently attended a summit in Washington DC on climate change where the keynote speaker was Dr John Holdren who is the Science Advisor to President Barack Obama. Dr Holdren gave a great presentation on the facts proving climate change, or what he coined "climate disruption". He believed "climate change" was too soft and too gradual a term that didn't portray the message of the true climate phenomenon that is currently facing the earth. Keep your eye out for "climate disruption" in the media.

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At the invitation of Dr. Andy Longmore, Victoria Department of Primary Industries, Kate Moore and I traveled to Queenscliff on the Bellarine peninsula at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay. We stayed in a wonderful, cosy bed and breakfast in Queenscliff called the Athelstane House and worked in the Department of Primary Industries Queenscliff Centre with a variety of fisheries scientists.

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