I recently attended a meeting in Maryland Senator Ben Cardin’s office in the Senate Hart Building. The meeting was with congressional staffers and representatives from a diversity of governmental agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Government Services Administration. The topic of the meeting was the potential relocation of the offices of the Chesapeake Bay Program.

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Last semester, Heath Kelsey and I taught a Marine Estuarine and Environmental Science (MEES) course titled “Transdisciplinary Science For Environmental Problem Solving." Our three Integration and Application Network students, Suzi Spitzer, Vanessa Vargas and Natalie Peyronnin enrolled in the 2 credit course. Professor Michael “Dougo” Douglas from the University of Western Australia attended most classes, in spite of the fact that it was 10 pm - 12 am in Perth, Australia.

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We recently completed our course entitled: "Healthy Rivers for All: Setting the course for sustainability with river basin health report cards". The course was co-taught by Heath Kelsey, Simon Costanzo and me, supported by Suzi Spitzer, our excellent teaching assistant. We used our recently completed book, "Practitioner's Guide to Developing River Basin Health Report Cards," as the textbook. Our lectures were based on content in our newly-published Practitioner's Guide.

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Sixteen years ago, in 2002, I returned to UMCES as Vice President for Science Application. I was shocked at how much the Chesapeake Bay had degraded in my ten-year absence. In addition to the “Pfiesteria Hysteria,” chronic dead zones occurred each summer, mahogany tides were recurrent, crab harvests were down, oysters were virtually gone, and the water was visibly turbid. In the following year, 2003, three books were published that chronicled the woes of Chesapeake Bay:

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Love, fifteen, thirty, and forty are tennis scores, but they also represent my relationship with Chesapeake Bay. On November 29, 2017, I gave a presentation at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) as part of a four-part series about the Chesapeake photographer Robert de Gast (1936-2016). Through April of this year, CBMM is exhibiting 80 photographs curated from more than 10,000 by de Gast in their collection. My talk was titled “After de Gast:

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Group photo of Healthy Rivers for All team. We held a two-day retreat with our WWF colleagues at Horn Point Laboratory in December 2017. This gathering was somewhat melancholy because it was our last retreat with Simon Costanzo and Karin Krchnak. Simon is no longer based in the US, having moved back to Australia. Karin left WWF in early January 2018 to join the World Bank as the Manager of the 2030 Water Resources Group.

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At the request of Kathy Stecker from the Maryland Department of Environment, Steve Raabe from Opinion Works and I partnered in a session at the annual Maryland Water Monitoring Council meeting held at the Maritime Conference Center in Linthicum, MD. We called our session “Communicating Challenges and Successes in a Changing World.” The Integration and Application Network has collaborated with Steve Raabe and Opinion Works for many years, so this partnership was a natural fit.

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The 2016 report card for the Maryland Coastal Bays was released on December 16th, 2017, at the Ocean City Marlin Club. The report card release was combined with the annual Gold Star Awards banquet. This event was scheduled a little later than usual due to some data processing holdups. In addition, aerial surveys of seagrasses could not be conducted in the summer of 2016 due to bad weather conditions.

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The Integration and Application Network (IAN) had an eventful and action-packed year. Several major transitions occurred during 2017: we moved into a new Annapolis office, developed our first IAN Strategic Plan and initiated our self-reflective IAN report cards. IAN staff taught or co-taught four courses:

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On 2-3 Dec 2017, fourteen Knauss Fellows had a science communication training retreat on the Horn Point Laboratory campus. The Integration and Application Network (IAN) has been training Knauss Fellows annually since 2013 and each year has been a lot of fun. The IAN team this year included Emily Nastase, Jamie Currie, Dylan Taillie, Caroline Donovan, and Bill Dennison. Emily Nastase worked hard at the Knauss Course.

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