Television crews were on hand, on February 27, to witness the spectacle of the Corps of Engineers opening the Bonnet Carre spillway on the Mississippi River. Runoff from record precipitation in the Midwest this winter feeds a flood that is making its way down the river. The spillway, located 12 miles west of New Orleans, serves as a safety valve meant to protect the city during extreme floods.

The Chesapeake Bay Program held a biennial retreat in Richmond, Virginia on March 13-14, 2019. This retreat was organized by Kristin Saunders, with help from Dave Goshorn and many others. The goal of the retreat was to review the progress of the adaptive management cycle after the initial two years of its implementation.

The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (formerly American Society of Limnology and Oceanography; ASLO) held its winter meeting in the San Juan, Puerto Rico convention center. The theme of the conference was “Planet Water: Challenges and Successes”. The session that I contributed to was on “Ecosystem Based Management: Holistic Approaches to Effective Management of Regional Ecosystem”.

James Shannon Building at the National Institutes of Health. I attended a Story Circles session at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland on 7 Feb 2019. My friend and colleague Randy Olson was conducting a one day training program and I rarely miss an opportunity to connect with Randy, based on our intertwined career journeys and our mutual interest in improving science communication.

Since this is the 500th blog that I have posted to the Integration … and Application Network website, it seems appropriate to reflect on my blogs. Originally, I was a reluctant blogger, and it took some time before Drs. Adrian … Jones, Peter Tuddenham and Bill Nuttle could convince me to start posting … blogs. My blogs started in earnest in 2011 when I was on sabbatical at the … International Water Centre in Brisbane, Australia.

As part of the 21st International Riversymposium, I presented a keynote talk entitled “Creating and communicating environmental intelligence“. Elements of environmental intelligence include the following: • The ability to acquire and apply environmental knowledge. • The collection of information of environmental value. • The ability to perceive your surroundings. The word ‘environment’ is derived from a French word ‘environ’, meaning surrounding.

Many of the Chesapeake Bay crowd gathered at an Eastport pub on a snowy evening to toast farewell to Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Secretary Mark Belton. Mark was Secretary of DNR for four years, as part of the Hogan Administration. Mark and his colleague Ben Grumbles Secretary of Maryland Department of Environment (MDE), led the Maryland contribution to the Chesapeake and Maryland Coastal Bays restoration efforts and I have enjoyed working with them.

Throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed, volunteer monitoring groups collect and assess important water quality and benthic macroinvertebrate data. Thanks to the hard work of the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative, many valuable resources, including methods manuals and factsheets, provide groups guidance in ensuring the quality-and therefore value-of their data.

Let us start this blog by saying that whenever … we travel to India, we are met with the warmest of hospitality from our … colleagues at the National … Center for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM). Dr Ramesh … Ramachandran, Dr Purvaja Ramachandran, Dr Ajit Pattnaik, and their wonderful team … always go above and beyond to ensure we have a wonderful and rich experience. So, thank you NCSCM!

My son, Rupert, and I decided to visit the National Gallery when he was home in Ottawa not long ago. A collection of photographs and videos called the Anthropocene has been drawing crowds all winter. An afternoon together at the art gallery seemed an ideal opportunity for some intergenerational bonding. As it turned out, if it weren’t for a virtual rhinoceros, I doubt that I could have survived with my parental dignity intact.