Heath Kelsey's account of the Future Earth Coasts Executive Committee meeting in Bremen, Germany.

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Participants at the first Coastal Resilience Symposium in Mérida, Yucatán represented numerous institutions and backgrounds from Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Portugal, and the United States. Credit:

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The first in person meeting of the new Future Earth Coasts International Project Office (FEC IPO) was in Bremen 27-29 March 2019. It’s an exciting time to be involved in Future Earth Coasts; the organization has a new home centered at the Liebnitz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, and additional offices distributed among several institutions in China, Australia, the United States, and Germany.

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These dolphins mark the entrance to the State Street Pier in Santa Barbara, California. Photo credit Heath Kelsey … Information generated through the Global Ocean Observation System has fundamentally … changed the way we understand our oceans and climate, but advances in ocean … observations have focused on physical elements like water temperature, currents, etc. more than they have for measurements of biological resources.

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The tomato icon was used to represent the Food Security and Land Use Change CRA … IAN has been working with the Belmont Forum since December, 2016 to help communicate the added value of transdisciplinary and transnational … research approaches as a pathway to sustainability.

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The Global Environment Facility (GEF) hosts a biennial International Waters Conference (IWC9 this year), which focuses on international water issues. Sarah Davidson and I were invited to the conference to talk about how ecosystem health report cards could support transboundary water assessments. This year the meeting was held in Marrakech, Morocco, from 5-8 November.

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Jamie Currie and I had an exciting meeting with experts on Texas coastal water quality, birds, seagrass, oysters, and fisheries on November 1 and 2 to create the first Texas Coast Ecosystem Health Report Card. We met at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies in Corpus Christi, Texas, which was a great venue for the meeting.

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Figure 1. The Bund area of Shanghai. Many of the buildings in this area are constructed on filled wetlands, much of which was built in the 1980’s. Photo credit: Heath Kelsey.

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The Tennessee River Basin Report Card was released in February this year. It was made possible in large part because of feedback the IAN team solicited during the Tennessee River Basin Planning Network (TRBN) meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee in August, 2017. Discussions we had at that meeting decided several issues related to the report card scope and detail that carried through to the finished product.

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The Healthy Rivers for All Partnership spent some quality time last week brainstorming about how our report card projects are perceived. We take it for granted that the report card process increases engagement and leads to great outcomes. We talk about how great report cards are all the time, and we believe it! Positive outcomes are documented through a comprehensive survey of groups that have completed a report card process.

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