Whitney Hoot, Adrianne Michaelis, Martina Gonzalez Mateur … Coastal and marine management systems vary along gradients; this semester, we’ve discussed gradients of size (in terms of physical area) and human population. Less obvious is the maturity gradient - how recent is the environmental management and the science informing the management of an ecosystem? How does this gradient correlate with other environmental management continuums? And why does the maturity gradient matter?

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Aimee Hoover, Cara Schweitzer, Suzi Spitzer … The words ‘science’ and ‘communication’ are too often disjointed in the eyes of academic scientists. Science involves building and organizing knowledge through testable explanations and predictions, while communication describes the exchange of information and meaning across time and space using various means. Scientists are often guilty of providing subpar explanations of their work.

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Sabrina Klick, Stephanie Siemek, Wenfei Ni … The Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) was established in 1983 and started the partnership between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the state of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the District of Columbia (NRC 2011). The partnership expanded in 2002 with the addition of Delaware, New York, and West Virginia under the Memorandum of Understanding.

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Cara Schweitzer, Rebecca Peters, Fan Zhang … Watershed size can be very important in the determination and implementation of environmental monitoring and management strategies of coastal systems.

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Chih-Hsien (Michelle) Lin, Detbra Rosales, Melanie Jackson … It is apparent that we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene (IGBP, 2001), in which Earth’s environment and climate is mainly controlled by human activity. Environmental damage is accelerating on a global scale. As the world’s population increases, improving standards of living without destroying or degrading the natural environment becomes a challenge.

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Emily Russ, Aimee Hoover, Whitney Hoot … Nearly 500 years ago, Nicholas Copernicus determined the Earth revolved around the sun. Scientists and philosophers hotly contested this radical idea in the sixteenth century, but further research eventually confirmed Copernicus' observations. This globally accepted understanding, or paradigm, that the sun is the center of our solar system was the result of this scientific effort.

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Martina Gonzalez Mateu, Adrianne Michaelis, Suzi Spitzer … Increasing knowledge about ecosystem dynamics over the past several decades has allowed us to make positive changes in our approach to resource management. In the past, management goals primarily focused on protecting single species, and tried to restore ecosystems to historical states that were considered desirable.

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Have you ever heard about Bill McKibbens and his three numbers? If not, you might want to read about it, if you are concerned about the future of the earth. In his Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math , McKibben used three simple numbers to explain the serious climate change situation we face right now, and we will face going forward [1]. The first number, 2° Celsius, is the safe number that scientists think increasing global temperature should be below.

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In 1610, Galileo Galilei published the Sidereus Nuncius , or the Starry Messenger, a paper which strongly suggested that Nicolaus Copernicus had been correct when he presented an alternative view of our solar system, over half a century earlier, in which the earth orbited around the sun and not vice versa. In doing so, Galileo changed the world by changing the way people saw themselves in it - shifting the scientific paradigm (Kuhn 1962).

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What is a report card? In a world filled with knowledge, how can you find a way to share ecological knowledge among different groups of people? Literature? Books? Newspapers? How about report cards? Ecological report cards are important tool for integrating diverse data types into simple scores that can be communicated to decision-makers and the general public. “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people”, says poet, William Butler Yeats.

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