Building Dinosaurs. With a name like that for a lecture how could I not be excited? So a few weeks ago I popped on over to D.C. for a seminar put on by the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI). They had arranged for their colleague, Michael Holland, to explain the ins and outs of his career as a paleo-artist. A little background on Michael:

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The plenary sessions for the CommOceans conference was in a 100-year old meeting hall. Photo credit: Heath Kelsey … At the recent commOcean2016 conference in Bruges, Belgium, I attended a short discussion session on effective science communication tools and strategies. Although the conversation was not exactly brisk, there was one exchange that triggered a new direction in my thinking about science communication, behavior change, and ecosystem health report cards.

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The Atlantic Estuarine Research Society (AERS) meeting was held on 16-18 March 2017 at St. Mary's College of Maryland. AERS was the first scientific society focused on estuaries, formed in 1948. Other regional societies sprang up and a consortium of regional societies was formed, called the Estuarine Research Federation, formed in 1971 (later renamed Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation).

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Last December 2016, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey and I teamed up with our partners at Future Earth’s Coasts, Martin LeTissier and Shona Paterson, to facilitate the Synthesis Workshop for the 13 Belmont Forum funded transdisciplinary projects in Coastal Vulnerability and Freshwater Security. During that time, Bill’s awesome songs were not the only ones that were produced; we also co-developed a draft Synthesis document with all the participants.

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Our Integration and Application Network (IAN) team has been traveling the globe to help various partners develop rigorous report cards. When we starting working with Tina Bishop and Peter Tuddenham from the College of Exploration to develop an evaluation approach for IAN, we realized that using the same process to develop report cards for our own assessment would be a useful way to evaluate ourselves.

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As part of our ongoing learning about science integration and application, our team reads and reviews papers that are relevant to the IAN mission. We recently read and enjoyed a paper by Estrada and Davis titled "Improving Visual Communication of Science Through the Incorporation of Graphic Design Theories and Practices Into Science Communication", published in the Journal Science Communication in 2015. In this paper, they called for the inclusion of 'visual literacy' in science communication.

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On 22 February 2017, a large group of friends and co-workers gathered at the University of Maryland College Park to celebrate the life of an extraordinary person, Erica Herling Kropp. Erica worked in a research support role for 43 years for the University System of Maryland. Her first stint was for 32 years at College Park, followed by an 11 year stint at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES).

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Dave Helweg and Christian Giardina organized a field trip on the Big Island of Hawai'i immediately following our workshop on Oahu. When the plane that Simon Costanzo and I were on landed in Hilo, Christian contacted us to inform me that his wife, Ingrid Dockersmith, had sailed with me aboard the R/V Westward as part of Sea Semester. I was the Chief Scientist and Ingrid was an Assistant Scientist when we left from Maine and sailed to Barbados, Bequia and eventually St.

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I enjoyed the University of Hawaii campus. We used the food trucks for lunch on the first day, and ate at the campus food court on the second day. After the first day of the workshop, we enjoyed sitting outside at the campus pub, drinking local Kona Longboard beer and listening to the mynah birds in the trees. The sound of the mynahs and the sight of pandanus trees made me recall my stint at the University of Queensland.

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On 7-8 March, Simon Costanzo and I facilitated an ecodrought workshop at the University of Hawaii at the main campus in Manoa, a suburb of Honolulu. Our host was the Pacific Islands Climate Science Center, headed by Dave Helweg. This Climate Science Center has a huge swath of territory to cover, including American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Guam, Palau and a host of isolated atolls (e.g., Johnstone, Palmyra).

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