Welcome, Sidney!
Sidney Anderson recently joined IAN as a Science Communicator. She graduated from College of the Atlantic in 2019 and from Georgia Southern University in 2021. She has conducted research on the yellow-spotted salamander, the Eastern painted turtle, and the Florida scrub lizard. She enjoys camping, birding, playing sports, and making art. She hopes to use her education and research experience in combination with her love of art and writing to help make science and conservation more accessible to anyone interested in learning about these topics.
Global Sustainability Scholars Arrive
From May to June, we will be joined by four Global Sustainability Scholars and Fellows: Lawren Caldwell, Anna Calderon, Nick An, and Pheng Lor. Global Sustainability Scholars are undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds researching sustainability challenges facing communities and environments. In collaboration with COAST Card, these students will work to enhance stakeholder engagement and evaluation and work to generate the Potomac COAST Card.
Summer interns learned science communication
This summer’s interns at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) took part in a two-day science communication course lead by various IAN science communicators on June 23rd and 29th. Throughout this course, they learned about the foundation of science communication and the how to apply these principles to their own work. The students are each conducting research on different aspects of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and by the end of the course, each student applied what they learned in the course to designing and presenting a
conceptual diagram about that research to their peers.
Maryland Coastal Bays State of the Bays Report now available!
On November 14th, the Maryland Coastal Bays Program and UMCES released the 5-year State of the Bays Report at the Marlin Club in Ocean City, Maryland. This year’s report, “Building Resilience in the Maryland Coastal Bays,” highlighted the threats and changes expected in the coastal bays and the actions currently being taken, or that need to be taken, in order to address these changes. This collaborative document sends the message that while some change cannot be avoided, there are actions that can be taken to maintain the health of important ecosystems. This report was released in conjunction with the 2021 Maryland Coastal Bays Report Card.
COAST Card Annual Meeting
On December 6th, the COAST Card Project held their third annual meeting. This virtual meeting brought together over 25 scientists from the United States, Norway, Japan, India, and the Philippines to discuss the project’s accomplishments over the last year and to set goals for 2023. Partners across the globe engaged in stakeholder engagement, marine spatial planning sessions, and hosted listening sessions in their communities. In the coming year, partners will continue to engage with the public and publish peer-reviewed papers, as well as begin in-person site visits to international study sites. Follow the link below to see the discussion board from the meeting and watch video updates on all the COAST Card project has accomplished throughout 2022.
First COAST Card workshop in Manila, Philippines
From February 26th to March 6th, members of the COAST Card team travelled to Manila Bay in the Philippines for the first in-person meeting of the project. This meeting brought together local stakeholders and scientists, as well as representatives from the project’s 4 international partners—Japan, India, Norway, and the United States. Over the course of the trip, project members gave talks, facilitated workshops, and engaged with the local community to begin development of the Manila Bay and Watershed Report Card. Field trips around the bay allowed project partners to experience this important area in the Philippines and see the characteristics of the bay that the team has been discussing virtually for the last two years. The team will be traveling to Tokyo Bay in November to continue its international site visits.