We recently completed our course entitled: "Healthy Rivers for All: Setting the course for sustainability with river basin health report cards". The course was co-taught by Heath Kelsey, Simon Costanzo and me, supported by Suzi Spitzer, our excellent teaching assistant. We used our recently completed book, "Practitioner's Guide to Developing River Basin Health Report Cards," as the textbook. Our lectures were based on content in our newly-published Practitioner's Guide.

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Sixteen years ago, in 2002, I returned to UMCES as Vice President for Science Application. I was shocked at how much the Chesapeake Bay had degraded in my ten-year absence. In addition to the “Pfiesteria Hysteria,” chronic dead zones occurred each summer, mahogany tides were recurrent, crab harvests were down, oysters were virtually gone, and the water was visibly turbid. In the following year, 2003, three books were published that chronicled the woes of Chesapeake Bay:

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Love, fifteen, thirty, and forty are tennis scores, but they also represent my relationship with Chesapeake Bay. On November 29, 2017, I gave a presentation at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) as part of a four-part series about the Chesapeake photographer Robert de Gast (1936-2016). Through April of this year, CBMM is exhibiting 80 photographs curated from more than 10,000 by de Gast in their collection. My talk was titled “After de Gast:

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Group photo of Healthy Rivers for All team. We held a two-day retreat with our WWF colleagues at Horn Point Laboratory in December 2017. This gathering was somewhat melancholy because it was our last retreat with Simon Costanzo and Karin Krchnak. Simon is no longer based in the US, having moved back to Australia. Karin left WWF in early January 2018 to join the World Bank as the Manager of the 2030 Water Resources Group.

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At the request of Kathy Stecker from the Maryland Department of Environment, Steve Raabe from Opinion Works and I partnered in a session at the annual Maryland Water Monitoring Council meeting held at the Maritime Conference Center in Linthicum, MD. We called our session “Communicating Challenges and Successes in a Changing World.” The Integration and Application Network has collaborated with Steve Raabe and Opinion Works for many years, so this partnership was a natural fit.

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Last November 5, 2017, Suzi Spitzer and I attended a Collaborative Learning workshop during the 24th Coastal Estuarine Research Federation Conference in Providence, RI. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Christine Baumann Feurt of the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve Coastal Training Program. Attending this workshop was one of the highlights of my CERF experience.

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The 2016 report card for the Maryland Coastal Bays was released on December 16th, 2017, at the Ocean City Marlin Club. The report card release was combined with the annual Gold Star Awards banquet. This event was scheduled a little later than usual due to some data processing holdups. In addition, aerial surveys of seagrasses could not be conducted in the summer of 2016 due to bad weather conditions.

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It was really encouraging to see the room fill up for my session at the Chesapeake Watershed Forum on the Friday afternoon of November 3rd. The room seated 46 people, and nearly every chair was taken. I was holding not only the first session of the conference, but the first session I’ve ever taught, at the first conference I’d ever visited. I really wasn’t sure what to expect.

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The bi-annual conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) took place November 5-9, 2017, in Providence, Rhode Island. I was able to attend in order to present about a paper that I co-authored with multiple colleagues from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), as well collaborators from other institutions. This paper is called New York Harbor: Resilience in the Face of Four Centuries of Development.

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The Integration and Application Network (IAN) had an eventful and action-packed year. Several major transitions occurred during 2017: we moved into a new Annapolis office, developed our first IAN Strategic Plan and initiated our self-reflective IAN report cards. IAN staff taught or co-taught four courses:

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