Today I learned of the untimely death of my colleague Scott Nixon from the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. There will be eloquent eulogies in the ensuing weeks and months, as Scott had a profound impact on many students and colleagues. While I will leave the eulogies to those former students and colleagues who knew Scott well, I did have a wonderful experience with Scott in October 2007 in Madrid, Spain that I am reflecting on.

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The following remarks were made at the 17 April 2012 release of the Chesapeake Bay report card: Welcome to the 2011 Chesapeake Bay report card release. My name is Bill Dennison, and I am with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science or UMCES. For the past six years, a group of scientists associated with a partnership that we formed between UMCES and NOAA called EcoCheck has been producing annual report cards for Chesapeake Bay.

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The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is an organization which funds research that protects and preserves the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in the face of climate change. The Foundation convened a workshop to develop a synthetic publication that charts the vision for assessing the vulnerability to climate change. The Great Barrier Reef components used in this assessment of climate impacts included coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and catchment runoff.

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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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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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