STAR team formed at Chesapeake Bay Program
A new Science & Technical Analysis & Reporting (STAR) team has been formed to facilitate the scientific support at the Chesapeake Bay Program. The STAR team includes monitoring, modeling, geographic information science, web, and information management scientists and will be initially chaired by Bill Dennison. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science staff at the Chesapeake Bay Program (Katie Foreman, Jeni Keisman, Sucharith Ravi, Guy Stephens, Ping Wang, Howard Weinberg, Jing Wu, and Guido Yactayo) will participate in the STAR activities to support the Goal Implementation Teams. The Goal Teams have been charged with delivery of the Chesapeake Bay Program targets and milestones. ChesapeakeStat is a data delivery system being created to provide resource managers accurate and timely information for decision-making, and the STAR team will populate the data layers, conduct analyses, and interpret data for ChesapeakeStat.
IAN sponsors MEES Colloquium: "Applying Science: Chesapeake Bay and beyond"
The Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Sciences (MEES) Colloquium is an annual event that brings graduate students, faculty, and alumni together from the different participating institutions within the University System of Maryland. This year IAN was proud to sponsor the event in downtown Annapolis. The first night's events were held in the historic Banneker-Douglass Museum. We were honored to have the Maryland Secretaries of Environment (Shari Wilson), Planning (Rich Hall), and Natural Resources (John Griffin) to discuss the role of science in their agencies and in the development of state environmental policies. We had a special guest speaker, NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold (a MEES graduate and former student of Bill Dennison), who gave an entertaining and informative talk on his recent Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. The second day's meeting was held in the State Senate President Conference Room and was highlighted by student talks and presentations by Don Boesch and Bill Dennison on applying science.
IAN begins new partnership with Conservation International
The Integration & Application Network will be working with Conservation International on a series of booklets and guidebooks on their Marine Management Area Science (MMAS) program. The program has been working for four years on a variety of studies around the world, including socioeconomic, ecosystem health monitoring, and governance projects. These projects, based at nodes in Panama, Belize, Brazil and Fiji, will be synthesized into a variety of products that will be used by practitioners and policy makers. For example, Conservation International and IAN convened a workshop in November to mock up a booklet on People & Oceans, which focuses on MMAS program research results on the socio-cultural and economic well-being of coastal communities and society.
Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation conference in Portland, Oregon
The biennial Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference, entitled "Estuaries and Coasts in a Changing World," was held in Portland, Oregon in November. The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) had a major presence at the meeting with various awards, sessions, posters, and presentations at the conference. Drs. Walt Boynton and Michael Kemp were recipients of the Odum Lifetime Achievement Award and Carolyn Keefe was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. IAN staff chaired sessions, presented both paper and electronic posters, and made presentations. IAN participants were Tim Carruthers, Bill Dennison, Ben Fertig, Katie Foreman, Adrian Jones, Jeni Keisman, Heath Kelsey, Bill Nuttle, Tracey Saxby, Jane Thomas, Ping Wang, Caroline Wicks, Michael Williams, and Jing Wu.