This month, the Chesapeake Bay Program Creative Team hosted a one-day symposium on all things web for an audience of friends and colleagues. Known as WebStock, the annual event was revitalized last spring as a way for the Creative Team to introduce others to the work they do and the methods they use to do it. Indeed, participants gained an understanding of how the Creative Team can help them and how they can use the team’s own tools and processes to improve their work.

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"Welcome to Rio! The Guanabara Bay first stakeholder workshop" (Portuguese translation by João Paulo Coimbra) O Rio de Janeiro é um estado brasileiro com cidades vibrantes (incluindo a cidade de mesmo nome) vizinhas à zona costeira da Baía de Guanabara e o Oceano Atlântico. A Baía de Guanabara é um sistema intensamente degradado em virtude da grande população, relacionada com a poluição por lixo e esgotos.

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Rio de Janeiro is a Brazilian State with vibrant cities (including the one with the same name) along the shore of Guanabara Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Guanabara Bay is highly impacted system due to a large population leading to sewage and trash pollution. The State of Rio and State of Maryland have a partnership of learning between their similar bays, Guanabara Bay and Chesapeake Bay, in order to promote opportunities for restoration to achieve economic, social, and environmental benefits.

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The Integration and Application Network (IAN) staff recently completed teaching a new course in Science Visualization. This course was part of the Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Science (MEES) Program through the University System of Maryland. Praxis, the word that Aristotle used to mean "thoughtful, practical doing", refers to the emphasis that this course had on developing the practical skills of science visualization.

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This blog is part of the Basin Report Card Initiative: a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) In March, Simon Costanzo and I traveled to Cambodia for the third workshop in the Linked Indicators for Vital Ecosystem Services (LIVES) Project, an initiative of the Luc Hoffman Institute. This five-day workshop brought us to the province of Kratie, a five-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh.

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The Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve Headquarters is located inside the The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute Campus in Port Aransas, Texas. Credit: richterarchitect.com (top) and K. Dunton/missionaransas.org (bottom) On April 27-28 I participated in another workshop related (indirectly) to the Texas Coast Report Card Pilot Project at Harte Research Institute in Corpus Christi Texas.

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After the first EcoHealth metrics workshop for the Texas Coast pilot project, Bill Dennison and I shared a shuttle to the airport with Porfirio Alvarez, from the University of Tabasco.

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Caroline Donovan and I facilitated a mini-workshop in Charleston, South Carolina this week to advance the NOAA Coral Reef Monitoring Program Report Card Pilot projects in American Samoa and Florida. The meeting went very well – we had some difficult things to work out, and everyone came together to do just that.

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The … Five IAN workshop components: 1. Workshop preparation. Workshop preparation is important, but often overlooked. Preparation includes carefully formulating a list of invitees well in advance in order to maximize participation of key people. An attempt is usually made to assemble a diverse set of participants to ensure diverse input and to avoid leaving out potential detractors. It is generally better to have detractors in the room than outside undermining the effort.

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In March, Bill Dennison, Simon Costanzo, and I travelled to Norman, Oklahoma for a workshop on ecological drought, part of an ongoing project with the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center. This was the third in a series of eight workshops to be held at each of the nation’s eight Climate Science Centers focusing on ecological drought.

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