This February, I headed further south in America than I have ever before…..to Colombia in South America (still in the northern hemisphere though at 3o N). This trip was on invitation from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Washington D.C. with the aim to set up a report card for three tributaries of the Orinoco River within Colombia - The Meta, Bita and Guaviare Rivers.

Read more

This is the second of two Blogs about the intersection of the Collective Impact approach and ecosystem health report cards. In Part 1, I discuss the principles of collective impact, and how our report card process can be a catalyst for engagement.

Read more

Bob Simon's untimely death is a cause for sadness. I had the good fortune of spending some time with him when I was living in Australia and Bob was there to film a story on the Great Barrier Reef. I know the exact day I met Bob Simon: 10 April 1999. The reason I remember this day so well was that my second child, Laura, was born at 2:30 am on 10 April.

Read more

This is the first of two posts about the application of report cards to enable a collective impact process. The collective impact model facilitates positive change … Collective Impact is a term used to refer to collaborative projects that create “needle-moving” changes to complex and intransigent problems. I ran across the term for the first time a few days ago, and it resonated strongly with me.

Read more

Celebrating 90 years of UMCES series … This year is the ninetieth celebration of the formation of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) in 1925. The origin of UMCES can be traced back to an amazing Marylander, Reginald Truitt, who founded the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

Read more

Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Westborough, Massachusetts for a scientific synthesis workshop on climate change and moose in the North Woods of Northeastern U.S. The workshop was located at an amazing new facility which serves as the field headquarters for MassWildlife (Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife). This building was opened last autumn and is a zero-net-energy building which includes an artificial trout stream stocked with brook trout in the atrium.

Read more

As part of our ongoing project with Charles Darwin University to synthesize the research on the flood plains of Kakadu National Park, we review the fundamentals of the environment and characteristics of the region, specifically the coastal tropical areas in the northern part of the territory. The Northern Territory is the third largest state or territory in the country with about 17.5% (1.3 million km2) of the land area.

Read more

On December 10, I traveled to Cocodrie, Louisiana, to visit Dr. Nancy Rabalais. Nancy is the Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), and she has done more than anyone else to draw attention to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Nutrients in runoff from the Mississippi watershed trigger low-oxygen conditions in the shallow coastal waters of the Gulf, just as they do in many estuaries around the world including the Chesapeake Bay.

Read more

As the final element of launching Phase 2 of the USAUS-H2O virtual environmental exchange program between eight high schools in Australia and eight high schools in the U.S., we held a teacher workshop for U.S. teachers in Annapolis and Washington, D.C. Judy O'Neil is the lead investigator of this project, assisted by Cindy Heil from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, Simon Costanzo and Brianne Walsh from IAN.

Read more

"Scientists who made a difference" series … Earlier this month, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey and I attended a meeting at the headquarters of The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia, which is located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. We were there to discuss what will happen next after the Mississippi watershed report card is launched this spring. This project has challenged us to expand the report card format in two ways.

Read more