The first in person meeting of the new Future Earth Coasts International Project Office (FEC IPO) was in Bremen 27-29 March 2019. It’s an exciting time to be involved in Future Earth Coasts; the organization has a new home centered at the Liebnitz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, and additional offices distributed among several institutions in China, Australia, the United States, and Germany.

Last month, Caroline, Alex, and I attended the Citizen Science Association (CSA) conference, CitSci2019, from March 13-16th in Raleigh, North Carolina. This conference was a great opportunity for us to learn more about what is happening in the field of citizen science, network with other professionals, and share updates on some of the projects that we are involved in at IAN.

Last month we put the finishing touches on a year-long effort to develop a monitoring program for volunteers who collect data on submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) throughout the Chesapeake Bay. The new program is called Chesapeake Bay SAV Watchers. Throughout this project, we collaborated with various stakeholders, including SAV experts, volunteer monitoring coordinators, and citizen scientists.

My first reaction to being invited to talk about Integration and Application Network (IAN) as a boundary organization was to ask, “What is a boundary organization?”. I looked up some definitions and liked the one that described a boundary organization in the following manner: “Organizations that facilitate collaboration and information flow between diverse research disciplines and between the research and public policy community”.

As part of the “Rounding the Curve on Adaptive Management” meeting in Richmond, VA, I gave the opening plenary talk. Kristin Saunders told me that the title and topic of the talk should be “We are Trailblazers”. The term “trailblazer” is described well by Ralph Waldo Emerson who said “Do not follow where the path may lead.

Earlier this month, Bill, Katie May, Vanessa, and I travelled to Portland, Oregon to attend the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) conference from March 19-23. We were all excited for the opportunity to learn from researchers and practitioners who work in the social sciences, and to absorb new ideas and approaches that will help us enhance IAN’s capacity to do work that spans natural and social science disciplines.

These dolphins mark the entrance to the State Street Pier in Santa Barbara, California. Photo credit Heath Kelsey … Information generated through the Global Ocean Observation System has fundamentally … changed the way we understand our oceans and climate, but advances in ocean … observations have focused on physical elements like water temperature, currents, etc. more than they have for measurements of biological resources.

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”.