Belmont Forum Plenary Meetings in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alexandra Fries recently traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil to help facilitate the Belmont Forum Plenary Meetings Week, November 6-10, 2017. The Belmont Forum is a group of funders that support international transdisciplinary research providing knowledge for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to global environmental change. These meetings brought together 65 attendees from more than 15 countries around the world. IAN helped the Belmont Forum prior to the event by creating materials such as the agenda, a booklet, templates, posters, a song, and videos. The session Alex facilitated was about how the Belmont Forum can be better at building capacity, engaging stakeholders, and measuring impacts of the projects they fund.
IAN makes a splash at CERF 2017
The 2017 Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation conference in Providence, Rhode Island was attended by a large University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) delegation, including IAN and UMCES at Chesapeake Bay Program staff. Bill Dennison received the inaugural Margaret A. Davidson Award for Stewardship at the opening plenary. Multiple presentations and posters were presented by IAN scientists throughout the week-long conference. IAN staff attended conference workshops and the UMCES reunion event. In addition, IAN staff actively manned the UMCES booth, developing an interactive mapping program to track various current and former UMCES staff.
Ecological Drought in the Southwest United States
The Department of the Interior Climate Science Centers (CSCs) have chosen the emerging climate science field of Ecological Drought as a research focus area. This newsletter highlights the outcomes of a two-day workshop sponsored by the Southwest CSC and held in Tucson, Arizona as part of a series of meetings at each of the nation's eight CSCs. Drought has long shaped the iconic landscapes of the Southwestern United States. However, the immediate threat of increasing temperatures are amplifying and accelerating the impacts of drought on humans and ecosystems. Ecological drought—the prolonged and widespread deficit in naturally available water for ecological processes—will drive ecosystems of the arid Southwest beyond natural thresholds, affecting ecosystem services, and triggering feedbacks in natural and human systems of the region.
Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative presents at the Chesapeake Watershed Forum
Caroline Donovan recently presented a poster on the Indicator Effectiveness Matrix, which demonstrates overlapping objectives between the Chesapeake Bay Program's Management Strategies and volunteer monitoring groups at the Chesapeake Watershed Forum. The Watershed Forum is an excellent venue for networking as well as learning about a variety of management and restoration activities throughout the watershed. IAN staff attend every year and enjoy it thoroughly! This year Emily Nastase, Dylan Taillie, Suzi Spitzer, and Vanessa Vargas presented in different sessions, with topics ranging from art in science to collaborative tools for stakeholder engagement.