In 2018, the Integration and Application Network partnered with OARS to initiate a river report card for the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers. This newsletter highlights two stakeholder workshops held at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge on February 28 and March 1, 2018. The initial workshop elicited what stakeholders value about the rivers, and subsequent workshop focused on how to measure those values, and where to find data.

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To protect the aquatic living resources of Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership has developed guidance for state water quality standards, which include ambient water quality criteria to protect designated uses (DUs), and associated assessment procedures for dissolved oxygen (DO), water clarity/underwater bay grasses, and chlorophyll-a. For measuring progress toward meeting the respective states' water quality standards…

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The response of estuarine ecosystems to long-term changes in external forcing is strongly mediated by interactions between the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, oxygen, and inorganic nutrients. Although long-term changes in estuaries are often assessed at the annual scale, phytoplankton biomass, dissolved oxygen concentrations, and biogeochemical rate processes have strong seasonal cycles at temperate latitudes.

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Fort Monroe National Monument is located at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula in Hampton, Virginia. The site includes the largest stone fort built in the United States and was formally added to the National Park System in 2011, recognizing millennia of human interactions with this landscape. Natural resources within the 325-acre park boundary include an ecologically diverse and productive saltmarsh cordgrass wetlands within Mill Creek.

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River water-quality time series often exhibit fractal scaling, which here refers to autocorrelation that decays as a power law over some range of scales. Fractal scaling presents challenges to the identification of deterministic trends because (1) fractal scaling has the potential to lead to false inference about the statistical significance of trends and (2) the abundance of irregularly spaced data in water-quality monitoring networks complicates efforts to quantify fractal scaling.

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The first ever Tennessee River Basin Report card provides a snapshot assessment of ecosystem stressors, condition, and protection in the Tennessee River Basin. This report card was produced in collaboration with the Tennessee River Basin Network, the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

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The Tennessee River Basin Report Card was developed as a tool for prioritization and restoration decisions made in the Tennessee River Basin. The report card document is also meant to serve as an outreach tool for use by managers to highlight particular issues of importance when communicating conservation and restoration with the public. This methods document discusses how the report card was developed and how the grades were calculated.

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Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative's Data Interpretation and Synthesis Methods Manual is a step by step comprehensive guide to interpreting and communicating data for beginner and experienced monitoring groups alike. This manual was produced to be used in tandem with a hands on workshop that guides attendees through the process of interpreting their data.

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IAN staff reflected back on accomplishments from 2016 in its 2nd annual report card. The self-assessment is based on indicators in three categories: social impacts, ecological outcomes, and partner engagement. IAN received an overall grade of A- (90%) which is up from 2015's grade of B+ (88%).

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The aim of this report card is to provide a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of 2016 Coastal Bays health. Coastal Bays health is defined as the progress of four water quality indicators (total nitrogen, total phosphorus, chlorophyll a , dissolved oxygen) and two biotic indicators (seagrass, hard clams) toward scientifically derived ecological thresholds or goals.

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