Environmental news is typically bad news. It is focused on negative aspects of human impacts on the environment, and often accompanied with dire predictions about the future. This propensity for dire predictions has been called the 'Cassandra syndrome', referring to Cassandra from Greek mythology who was cursed with the ability to foretell the future but nobody would believe her warnings. There is a good book entitled "Believing Cassandra:

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Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, physicist, was born in Paris on September 18, 1819, and he died there on February 11, 1868. Foucault was a gifted experimentalist.

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This newsletter was interesting to put together, as it involved looking through hundreds of photographs of flood damage in the Moreton Bay watershed. Some of the photos were staggering. There were photos of tractors and automobiles crushed like small tin cans, a time sequence of water rising over a farm shed within minutes, streambeds stripped down to the bedrock, and tree roots exposed instead of being buried deep in soil.

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My university teaching experience has been quite varied. I have taught first year students in massive lecture halls, graduate students in small groups, and everything in between. At the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, we teach using an interactive video network. My attitude about the large lecture setting is that the students forget what I said shortly after I say it, and I forget what I said shortly after I say it.

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On Monday, I went to the University of Queensland to meet with a former student, Dr. Chris Roelfsema and his student Mitch Lyons. Chris and Mitch, who are part of Professor Stuart Phinn's remote sensing group, had worked up a seagrass risk map for Moreton Bay, based on light attenuation from the flood plume, bathymetry and knowledge of seagrass light requirements.

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The International WaterCentre, formed as a consortium of four Australian universities, offers a Master's degree program in water management. As part of the 18 month (full time) course, a field trip to North Stradbroke Island is included. I attended two of the three days, and led a field trip to the seagrass beds in One Mile Harbor, near the town of Dunwich. The Moreton Bay Research Station in Dunwich was used in the course.

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Along with the release of v6.0 of the IAN Symbol Libraries (see the blog announcement), IAN has developed a free online diagram creator. This tool allows users to create conceptual diagrams in their web browser without the need for expensive software. The diagrammer connects directly to our symbol library database so that users can search for symbols by keywords, browse the albums, select from an IAN project symbol set, or work from their lightbox collection.

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The IAN Symbol Libraries has reached a major milestone of 2500 vector symbols with the release of v6.0. This version has been a long time coming, with the last release all the way back in 2005. We think users will find it worth the wait. The highlights of this release are:

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A 2011 Flood Science Taskforce was convened on 20 January 2011 to coordinate flood monitoring efforts and to discuss potential environmental impacts in the catchment and the waterways, including Moreton Bay. At the task force meeting, aerial and satellite images were displayed, the hydrodynamic model was run and available data were presented.

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The mayor of Moreton Bay Regional Council, Councillor Allan Sutherland, invited me and Eva Abal, the scientific coordinator for several Brisbane based organizations, Healthy Waterways, International Water Centre, Great Barrier Reef Foundation (and my first PhD student) for lunch in Redcliffe. Allan was Deputy Mayor of Redcliffe City Council when I first met him.

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