Sponsored by the Australian Water and Environmental Research Alliance (AWERA), a workshop on environmental report cards was held near Brisbane, Australia. This workshop focused on how environmental report cards have emerged as a technique to integrate data and provide feedback to a wide range of stakeholders as to the ecosystem health of a particular region.

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In March, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey, and I traveled to Nadi, Fiji to facilitate a workshop aimed at streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region. The 2010 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ and Forum Economic Ministers’ directive on reporting acknowledged the need to streamline global, regional and national reporting to reduce the reporting burden at the national level.

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QUESTION: Hi, Adam from the Department of Environment. Thanks for the presentation. One of the key messages I got which was really cool was that you think that it’s important to synthesize as you go through the research. I want to know the challenges in terms of synthesizing and sharing knowledge and data before publishing. What are the pros and cons? How do you balance that juxtaposition? BILL: Very good question.

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One of the things I would like to leave this conference with is some ideas about how we can collaborate between Chesapeake Bay and Australia. Let’s figure out how we can collaborate and work together. I’ll give you an example that I’ve thought up with some other folks at the University of Queensland. We can look at event-driven responses. We had a big flood in 2003 in the Chesapeake, and of course, Moreton Bay had the 2011 flood.

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This is where Governor O’Malley came in and he created BayStat. This was based on tracking nutrient and sediment reductions. Our eutrophication problem is over-enrichment of nutrients creating dissolved oxygen “dead zones”. Innovations in governance: BayStat … O'Malley puts together an interesting assortment of people.

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The last thing I want to talk about is innovations in governance. This is a story I want to start in New York City, where there was a guy called Jack Maple. He always had a bow-tie and a bowler. He was a transit cop, policing the subways and buses in New York. He started putting pins on maps, to plot where crime was. He then started being seen as some guru, because he predicted Friday at 4 o clock, there was going to be a mugging at the Broadway Street subway station.

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Report cards are also a great way to bring together disparate groups. An extreme example is that the US State Department was trying to mediate some dialog between Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan when Armenia and Azerbaijan were technically still at war. So we got together with them, and we put up this first map of six indicators. They had never seen this map or this data before.

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I want to talk about innovations in environmental reporting. One of the things we stumbled upon in Southeast Queensland is environmental report cards, and I got to thinking why they are so powerful. I have two teenage children, who you can definitely see are driven by peer pressure in their everyday life. Peer pressure is a really powerful motivator.

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Another thing that we did was create IAN Press. We’ve created a self publishing kind of approach and what’s cool about it is that this can be full color, 230 pages, and we can sell it for $20 US, and not lose money. We finally have the technology of tablet computers. The tablet version really works because you can scale up images and get a really good look at them. I think that the electronic tablet era is going to be really handy for these kinds of publications.

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I distinguish science communication from science writing. If you think about a science paper, you provide lots of references, which is the scientific context for that study. Science communication provides societal examples, because it's all about context, to make the message translate to a broader audience. In scientific literature, there is usually just text, while in science communication, we try to balance with graphics and use color.

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