Report card goals relate to benefits provided by coexisting natural ecosystems and human-built infrastructure. The problem is that the Ohio River is a working river. That thought occurred to me as I watched the barges glide past the window during the Ohio River report card workshop last December. A team of IAN science communicators spent two days on the banks of the Ohio River, across from Cincinnati, gathering information from experts on the Ohio and Tennessee River basins.

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'Scientists who made a difference' series … Alexander von Humboldt became world famous by illustrating how nature works. If you ever get to Humboldt, Nebraska (40°9′54″N 95°56′45″W) you will have gotten someplace special. Humboldt lies almost exactly at the geographic center of the Mississippi River watershed; motto:

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Last week, I attended a meeting of the Changing Course design competition in New Orleans. The Changing Course competition will stimulate innovative thinking about the future shape of coastal Louisiana, including possibly relocating the main channel of the Mississippi River below New Orleans - hence its name. The purpose of this meeting was to bring together the eight teams invited to enter the competition to review the issues at stake and answer questions about the competition.

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The Changing Course competition will stimulate discussion about the future course of the Mississippi River near its mouth. Large areas of wetlands have converted to open water in the delta of the Mississippi over the past 30 years. A changing climate and accelerating sea level rise are expected to make the problem of land loss worse and increase impacts on coastal communities.

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The seawall was an admission that everything tried so far was not working. This past summer I discovered that Bethany Beach, Delaware, has something that few other beach resorts can claim — a 16 foot dune. Families strolling the boardwalk or hanging out to eat ice cream gaze out on to a rising slope of dune grass instead of ocean surf playing on a sunlit beach. The beach and the surf are there, to be sure, and the dune is there to make sure the beach stays where it is.

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The report card for the Mississippi River basin. The purpose of this report card is to provide people with information on status and trends of the entire Mississippi basin taken as a whole. The watershed of the Mississippi covers 40 percent of the continental United States. Exploration and development of the region during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries helped define the character of the United States.

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We all have a stake in sustaining functional ecosystems … When ecologists and economists began talking about ecosystem services in the 1990s it was to make a stronger argument for restoring and preserving natural systems. The idea that nature provides the life-support system of the planet, cleaning and recycling the air and water and providing us with food and raw materials, motivated the environmental activists of the 1960s and 70s.

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This spring brings hopeful signs of an environmental awakening. I woke up this morning thinking about Rachel Carson. I wasn’t thinking about the author, exactly. It was more to do with the period of the early 1960s when Rachel Carson made a difference - a period of growing environmental consciousness as a prelude to taking action. Could it be that we are now in a similar period with respect to climate change? That possibility has put me in a cautiously optimistic mood.

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People are part of a hybrid socio-environmental ecosystem. The debate over whether people should start geoengineering the atmosphere in order to prevent the worst effects of global warming ignores one essential fact - we already are geoengineering the atmosphere. Geoengineering is the deliberate effort to manipulate processes that control conditions in the atmosphere on a global scale.

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Is it time to rethink our 19th century approach to dealing with human waste? The discovery of the cause of a cholera epidemic in London, in the mid 19th century, unleashed an international movement that improved sanitation in cities, and also altered the relationship between people and the environment. The result has been an increase in living standards.

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