IAN staff and HRI scientists collaborated in a series of workshops in 2016 and 2018 to produce the 2019 Texas Coast Ecosystem Health Report Card. This report card uses 13 biotic and 2 abiotic indicators to determine the overall condition of the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The coastline scored a B- (80%) overall, indicating moderately good ecosystem health. The report card breaks its indicators into five different categories: water quality, fisheries, birds, oysters and seagrasses.

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The Department of the Interior Climate Science Centers (CSCs) and their managing organization, the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, 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 held in Honolulu, Hawaii as part of a series of meetings at each of the nation’s eight CSCs.

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This report card provides a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of Chesapeake Bay. In 2018, the report card includes five water quality indicators and two biotic indicators. In 2018, the overall grade for Chesapeake Bay is a 46%, a C. This means the Bay is in moderate health. Despite the decrease in score from 2017, overall bay health is still significantly improving over time. Long term trends of each reporting region health and a fisheries index are also presented.

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This newsletter summarizes outputs from the second stakeholder workshop to develop the Verde River Watershed Report Card. The objectives of the workshop were to: i) develop indicators, ii) discuss scoring approaches, and iii) establish narrative appropriate for the report card. Indicators for the report card center around three main themes: Water, Habitat, and Communities—all necessary components to determine the health of the Verde watershed.

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Flux quantification for riverine water-quality constituents has been an active area of research. Statistical approaches are often employed to make estimation for days without observations. One such approach is the Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) method. While WRTDS has been used in many investigations, there is a general lack of effort to identify factors that influence its estimation bias.

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This is the first Everglades report card. It is a RECOVER product that provides a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of health of the Florida Everglades using data from May 1, 2012 – April 30, 2017. The Everglades Report Card, a complement to the 2019 System Status Report, assesses and synthesizes ecological data to evaluate overall ecosystem condition using performance-driven metrics compared against a goal or ecologically-relevant threshold.

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As a product of the REstoration COordination and VERification (RECOVER) Monitoring and Assessment Plan (MAP), this report details the evaluation of systemwide performance measures and their targets (or goals) using the ecological tools developed over the past several years under the RECOVER’s MAP program to measure restoration progress.

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The relative dominance of controlling factors in saltwater intrusion depends on the time scale in which the variability in characterized. Long-term time series data of salinity and temperature has been collected in the Chester River, Chesapeake Bay, showing considerable variabilities of saltwater intrusion with time scales from days to years.

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This technical document summarizes the methodology for the indicator calculations and scoring for the Everglades Report Card.

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Water clarity is an important ecosystem indicator of eutrophication in Chesapeake Bay and other coastal and estuarine systems across the globe. Although a variety of measures are available to quantify light availability in water, Secchi disk depths have been the most consistent and frequent measure employed in water monitoring programs.

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