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.

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Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Westborough, Massachusetts for a scientific synthesis workshop on climate change and moose in the North Woods of Northeastern U.S. The workshop was located at an amazing new facility which serves as the field headquarters for MassWildlife (Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife). This building was opened last autumn and is a zero-net-energy building which includes an artificial trout stream stocked with brook trout in the atrium.

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As the final element of launching Phase 2 of the USAUS-H2O virtual environmental exchange program between eight high schools in Australia and eight high schools in the U.S., we held a teacher workshop for U.S. teachers in Annapolis and Washington, D.C. Judy O'Neil is the lead investigator of this project, assisted by Cindy Heil from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, Simon Costanzo and Brianne Walsh from IAN.

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In a partnership with the Maryland state government, the Chesapeake Bay. This website (chesapeakebaystory.umces.edu) uses water quality, fisheries and habitat data, various maps and graphs, and scientific publications to inform a narrative version of the historical trends of Chesapeake Bay health. The website describes various ecosystem health indicators, and displays annual maps and graphs using a slider bar on a timeline, as well as a map grid which displays summary maps for every year.

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I attended a two-day workshop on January 13-14 held at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. It was organized by Tom Horton and Karl Blankenship and sponsored by Town Creek Foundation and the Bay Journal. Roughly 150 people gathered for these two days to talk about an issue that we generally do not talk about regarding Chesapeake Bay: population growth. Population growth has been an issue that Tom Horton, the prolific Chesapeake author and activist, has been advocating for some time.

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One of the important decisions in developing environmental report cards is choosing the reporting region boundaries. In addition to defining the overall extent of the report card coverage, defining the reporting regions within this coverage is crucial.

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Seagrass science was largely influenced by the seminal book "Seagrass of the World", written by Cornelis den Hartog in 1970. Professor den Hartog is a spritely Dutch botanist, now in his 80s, who also was the founding editor of the journal Aquatic Botany in 1975. This 270 pp. book was published by North-Holland Publishing Co.

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As part of our involvement in the New York Harbor. I read "The Great Bridge: The epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge" by David McCollough. It was a wonderful read, providing historical context and delving into the fascinating story of the three Roeblings who were key to the effort:

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There are many changes ahead in 2015, including new leadership in academia, government and science, management strategies for the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement, a major Conowingo research effort, and new staffing at the Chesapeake Bay Program. Academic leadership. The Chancellor of the University System of Maryland, Brit Kirwin, is retiring after his distinguished tenure and his successor has been named, Bob Caret.

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Often the focus on science communication is the data visualization or the words or phrases chosen about a topic. But another important aspect of communicating science, both informally and formally is the use of hand drawn sketches. These sketches can be very simple black and white lines to complex color drawings. These sketches can be created using a stick to draw something in the dirt or sand, or chalkboards and whiteboards, or modern tablets and computers that have drawing applications.

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