This is part three of a three part series of blog posts about developing a reef resilience index for the Great Barrier Reef at a workshop in Townsville in March 2015 … Reef Resilience in Townsville … William C.

This is part two of a three part series of blog posts about developing a reef resilience index for the Great Barrier Reef at a workshop in Townsville in March 2015 … The Great Barrier Reef Resilience Index … As part of a joint project of UMCES and Charles Darwin University, Jane Thomas, Bill Dennison and I traveled to Townsville, Australia to continue the development of the Great Barrier Reef Resilience Index.

This is part one of a three-part series of blog posts about developing a reef resilience index for the Great Barrier Reef at a workshop in Townsville in March 2015. 'Resilience Based Management' was one of the concepts that arose during our workshop with resource managers at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in Townsville, Australia on 2 Mar 2015.

Celebrating 90 years of UMCES series … As I was looking through the newspaper clippings and photographs of Reginald V. Truitt, founder and first director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, I was intrigued by a photograph of Truitt standing in a metal hatch protruding from the water and shaking hands with another gentleman. On the back of this photograph, the following words were inscribed "R.V. Truitt & Gilbert Klingel" and "Developers of the Bentharium" along with the year "1935".

As a follow-on from the Gladstone Harbor Report Card, which IAN helped design last year, I had the chance to help Queensland Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP) develop a draft report card for the next region, in Mackay. I attended the workshop in Mackay on February 24, to facilitate the discussion about report cards, discuss issues related to report card development, and help sketch out the draft report card in a storyboard exercise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.