In the middle of the National Environmental Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) seagrass project, we created the Annapolis Synthesis Center. The UMCES Annapolis Office … Annapolis is much like Santa Barbara, it's a cute town that you can walk around in, fly in without getting in a car, and it's the capital of Maryland as well as home to the U.S. Naval Academy.

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At the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, we formed a seagrass working group, recruiting colleagues to help populate a global database of seagrass trajectories. We focused on what we could document in terms of seagrass area, density, biomass and cover. Seagrass working group at NCEAS … And then we used that database, interrogated it and wrote scientific papers. The first thing we saw, as expected, was that seagrass is being lost, globally.

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The synthesis I want to talk about is that synthesis that leads to environmental outcomes, so this isn't just writing books and papers for colleagues, it is taking that next step to generate environmental outcomes in terms of policy, in terms of planning, in terms of implementation and in terms of directing our resources towards making maximum benefit of our available environmental dollars.

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I want to talk about innovations in environmental synthesis, reporting and governance and how these innovations apply to the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network in Australia. And I'll start by explaining a little bit about where I'm currently based at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. We are right on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, in the vicinity of Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland.

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QUESTION: One of the things we have been noticing through the Healthy Country project is there has been a complete lack of people coming up through the system that have the skills and the capacity actually, more or less, to do what we needed. Your advice that it is necessary for us to make this change to be involved in the engineering or softer engineering, as you suggested. Is there a change in the U.S. in relation to this? Are you finding that more students are coming to Maryland?

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The seminar was rounded off by some dancing with Dewey the Dugong, thanks to Dr. Peter Oliver who wrote and performed 'Dugong Rock'. Peter also inspired the dancing with his Dugong Rock competition. Also, thanks to Dr. Tanzi Smith, a former University of Queensland student now working in the Mary River Catchment, who drove Dewey all the way down to Brisbane for his performance.

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I want to wrap up with a little bit of vision towards the future and a ray of hope and optimism. And that comes from an analysis I did of the history of paradigm shifts that have occurred in societies starting in the 1500's. Paradigm shift can lead to a sustainability revolution … There is a great book, "Human accomplishment:

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Globally, seagrasses are a good indicator of ecosystem health, and so we have gone and put a global database together and started analyzing this and we've written a bunch of papers. This is one of the graphics from a paper showing that there is a preponderance of seagrass area data in North America, Europe and Australia. Global seagrass database analysis revealed net losses … Not so much in the rest of the world. Now that's starting to come in with these volunteer programs:

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So let's look at Moreton Bay. The Brisbane River catchment soils were heavily eroded, and several folks from Healthy Country helped us assemble this story. We saw large-scale sediment erosion, and we can see boulders that rolled down the stream like pebbles. In some places the granitic bedrock was eroded thirty centimeters, taking the soil out of the paddocks, into the rivers and down, ultimately into Moreton Bay. Brisbane River catchment soils were heavily eroded.

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That was the 'Living with Floods' part of the talk, and now I would like to transition to the second part, which is to talk about the impacts of this flood and the impacts on the natural resources, which translate into Moreton Bay. And I'm going to start with a story about the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay is the best-studied estuary in the world. It is 300 kilometers top to bottom.

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