On October 14, 2015, in St. Louis, Missouri, I unveiled the Report Card for the Mississippi River Watershed, a project that almost everyone on the IAN Science Communication team has worked on at some point since 2012. The event was on the roof top patio of at the Hyatt Regency at the Arch in Downtown St. Louis, with great views of the river and the St. Louis Arch.

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Re-engineering the Mississippi River presents political as well as technical challenges. Advances in technology since the beginning of the industrial revolution have transformed both transportation along the Mississippi River and the river itself. The invention of the paddlewheel steamboat in the early 1800s offered a radical advance over previous, more primitive modes of river transportation. By the 1830s, steamboats regularly moved people and goods along the Mississippi and its tributaries.

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This is the second of two Blogs about the intersection of the Collective Impact approach and ecosystem health report cards. In Part 1, I discuss the principles of collective impact, and how our report card process can be a catalyst for engagement.

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On December 10, I traveled to Cocodrie, Louisiana, to visit Dr. Nancy Rabalais. Nancy is the Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), and she has done more than anyone else to draw attention to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Nutrients in runoff from the Mississippi watershed trigger low-oxygen conditions in the shallow coastal waters of the Gulf, just as they do in many estuaries around the world including the Chesapeake Bay.

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"Scientists who made a difference" series … Earlier this month, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey and I attended a meeting at the headquarters of The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia, which is located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. We were there to discuss what will happen next after the Mississippi watershed report card is launched this spring. This project has challenged us to expand the report card format in two ways.

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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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I traveled to Kansas City, Missouri August 26, 2014 to facilitate a workshop in the Missouri River Basin, as part of the Mississippi River Report Card project with America’s Watershed Initiative. This meeting, held at the Kansas City Airport Hilton, was a follow-up to the May 23 meeting we had in Rapid City, South Dakota, where we got a good start on conceptualizing issues and concerns in the basin.

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