Simon Costanzo, Heath Kelsey, Dave Loewensteiner, Judy O’Neil, Jane Thomas and I attended the 17th Annual International Riversymposium in Canberra, Australia, 15-18 September 2014. The theme of this year’s symposium was ‘Large River Basins’ which was quite topical for the IAN team completing the draft Mississippi River report card.

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As part of the release of the draft Mississippi River report card, we partnered with America's Watershed Initiative and Conversant to produce a short video that described both the process of producing the report card and the report card scores. This video did a great job of linking the riverboat paddle wheel with the report card graphic based on the paddle wheel.

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We recently (1-2 October 2014) launched the draft Mississippi River report card in Louisville, KY as part of the America's Watershed Initiative Summit. The process of developing the report card is depicted in the following poem I wrote for the occasion. We started out in St. Louis, Missouri … We set the goal--a watershed report card … We figured, it can't be too hard … But we were tackling the entire Mississippi!

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Heath Kelsey, Bill Nuttle, Caroline Donovan, Brianne Walsh and I traveled to Louisville, KY on the banks of the Ohio River to participate in the 2014 America's Watershed Initiative Summit. This Summit represented the culmination of a series of basin workshops and a concerted effort by IAN Science Integrators, Science Communicators, and Science Communication Interns to determine indicators, access indicator data and calculate scores.

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The four Thiess International Riverprize finalists provided inspirational examples of creative solutions for river protection and restoration. The winner of the 2014 Riverprize was the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine, a group of committed and passionate individuals who have transformed the "Sewer of Europe" into a river with high water quality, migratory fish and restored floodplains. There were four very worthy finalists for the 2014 International Riverprize:

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During our ten-year stint at the University of Queensland, we were fortunate to have access to high quality on-campus child care. This child care was a decisive factor in maintaining dual careers for my wife Judy O'Neil and for me. As well, our children developed lifelong friendships at the two child care facilities: Munro Centre (ages 0-3) and Campus Kindy (ages 3-5).

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In order to kick off 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 in Canberra, Australia. Judy O'Neil, Simon Costanzo and I traveled to Canberra, the capital city of Australia where our partners from Charles Darwin University organized the workshop at the University House, Australian National University.

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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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‘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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