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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In March, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey, and I traveled to Nadi, Fiji to facilitate a workshop aimed at streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region. The 2010 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ and Forum Economic Ministers’ directive on reporting acknowledged the need to streamline global, regional and national reporting to reduce the reporting burden at the national level.

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A recently released policy statement by a group of Senior Scientists and Policymakers provides a review of nutrient trading as a management tool to be used in Chesapeake Bay. Nutrient trading, the buying and selling of nutrient reduction credits, is a relatively new approach that is being applied to achieve nutrient reductions. There is a new tool provided by Google that tracks the use of different terms over time called ‘Google Ngram Viewer’.

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A group called "Clean water, Healthy families" released the results of a poll of Maryland voters regarding Chesapeake Bay restoration. This poll provided some interesting findings. It was particularly gratifying to see that the public perception of the health of the Bay (average C-) matches EXACTLY with the EcoCheck report card (2010 score = C-). The grade voters give their local streams, creeks, and rivers is only a slightly higher C-Minus.

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The use of red, yellow and green for denoting different levels of concern in environmental report cards has its origin in human perceptions of color. The color red is associated with blood and fire, which are instinctively perceived as 'danger'. Red is classified as a 'warm' color and infrared light is essentially heat. The color yellow is associated with warning, like a wasp with its yellow and black bands. The color green is associated with healthy vegetation, like tree leaves or grass.

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In order to create a map of stream health in the Chesapeake watershed, Katie Foreman, Scott Phillips, Claire Buchanan and colleagues in the Non Tidal Workgroup of the Chesapeake Bay Program generated a data set of benthic macroinvertebrate condition using data collected by state agencies in the Chesapeake watershed. The original map created by Katie and her team in 2009 had approximately 3,200 data points, distributed throughout the watershed.

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The Maryland Coastal Bays Program report card was released at an interesting venue in Ocean City in late afternoon, June 30. Macky's Barside & Grill on 54th Street in Ocean City provided a bayside venue for the release with perfect weather. Jet skis and motorboats were buzzing in and out of the canal, a roosting colony of laughing gulls in the marsh and the babble of dinner guests eating in the sandy beach provided a lively backdrop to the proceedings.

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The weather is often the main topic of discussion amongst friends, around the office water cooler, and even between strangers. The professional meteorologist is one of the most maligned positions in our society. Yet everyone cares about the weather forecast; so much so there is even a 24-hour cable station dedicated to providing every detail about temperature, humidity and the relative chance of precipitation at 3,000 locations nationwide.

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