I first heard the story of the salmon in the tree while visiting in Haida Gwaii this summer. Haida Gwaii is a set of islands along the northwest coast of North America that is home to the Haida people, one of several nations of the aboriginal people that have existed here for about 10,000 years. I am an engineer by training, and my traveling companions, my wife Lenore and friends Tom and Nancy, are scientists.

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I traveled to Kansas City, Missouri August 26, 2014 to facilitate a workshop in the Missouri River Basin, as part of the Mississippi River Report Card project with America’s Watershed Initiative. This meeting, held at the Kansas City Airport Hilton, was a follow-up to the May 23 meeting we had in Rapid City, South Dakota, where we got a good start on conceptualizing issues and concerns in the basin.

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Tracey Saxby and I traveled to Baton Rouge for a two-day training session for the Louisiana Sea Grant Discovery Integration and Application (LA DIA) scholars. Robert Twilley, Louisiana Sea Grant Director, and his staff helped us develop this training session.

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In conjunction with our work on the Long Island Sound embayment report cards, I was invited to speak about report cards at the first annual Connecticut Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Conference. The conference was held on July 25th, 2014 at Goodwin College. The organizers of the conference were Jacqueline Talbot with the Connecticut River Watershed Council and Meghan Ruta with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP).

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Understanding resilience to climate change effects is critical to the future of environmental assessment and reporting. Changing air and water temperature, precipitation patterns and storm frequencies, CO2 concentrations, and sea level rise will add significant pressure to the natural and engineered systems that provide us services. Understanding system resilience to these changes is important to developing relevant monitoring, assessment, and reporting frameworks.

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Alex Fries and I had the chance to represent UMCES at the Conference on Ecosystem and Ecological Restoration (CEER) on the New Orleans riverfront from July 28 to August 1, 2014. I presented on our … Alex Fries at the UMCES booth … CEER Conference a good venue for the Mississippi Report Card … There could not have been a more appropriate location to talk about a report card for the Mississippi River than New Orleans, Louisiana this July.

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‘Scientists who made a difference’ series … This blog accompanying the biographical sketch of Isaac Newton looks at a selection of his writing as poetry and a selection of his scientific sketches as art. The ‘Poetry” uses Newton’s exact words (translated into English from the Latin text) in prose form to focus on the cadence and word choice.

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‘Scientists who made a difference’ series … Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the same year that Galileo Galilei died. He was born in a modest farmhouse in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, just north of London. His father died before he was born and his mother remarried when Isaac was three years old and she left him to be cared for by his maternal grandmother. When Isaac was ten years old, his step-father died and his mother moved back with three younger half-siblings.

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On 16 July, the Integration and Application Network staff met in Solomons, Maryland for a three hour cruise aboard the R/V Rachel Carson followed by a tour of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. The R/V Rachel Carson, skippered by Michael Hulme and crewed by Rob Nilsen, took us out to the center of the Bay for a hydrocast in 33 meters of water. Dave Loewensteiner helped out with the various scientific samplings and Jeremy Testa helped with the interpretation of the data.

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Recently IAN was asked to attend and present at the 16th Consultative Committee Meeting on Large Marine Ecosystems and Coastal Partners in Paris, France. I was lucky enough to be the one from IAN chosen to participate and I absolutely loved it! It’s unusual these days to attend a meeting and not know anyone, but this was the case for me at the UNESCO headquarters in the Invalides district of Paris.

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