The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling established by President Obama was tasked with determining the root causes of the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, evaluate the responses, and make recommendations to minimize the risk that such a disaster would ever happen again. This report by the Commission is a graded progress assessment of the Administration, Congress, and the Oil Industry on implementing those recommendations.

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This report card provides a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of Chesapeake Bay. The overall health of Chesapeake Bay, determined using water quality and biotic indicators, declined slightly in 2011. The overall grade of D+ was a decrease for the second year in a row, down from a C- in 2010. Only two reporting regions, the Patapsco and Back Rivers, and the Lower Western Shore (MD), had improved grades in 2011.

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This is the second annual Anacostia River Report Card. It scores four water quality indicators (dissolved oxygen, fecal bacteria, water clarity, and chlorophyll a), one biotic indicator (submerged aquatic vegetation) and policy efforts, and discusses issues specific to the Anacostia. The report card also includes information on actions that citizens can take to help improve the health of the Anacostia River.

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The Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Trust Fund was created in 2007 in an effort to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution to these bays. The Trust Fund has focused its financial resources on the implementation of effective non-point (i.e., diffuse) source pollution control projects in high priority watersheds. This newsletter details examples of projects supported by the Trust Fund including stream channel restorations, stormwater retrofits, and cover crops.

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This report card is an assessment of the aquatic health of the Magothy River, and is based on data collected by the Magothy River Association and various partners. It reports the status of vital habitats and water quality in the Magothy during 2010 based on three different indicators.

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Conceptual diagrams are science communication tools that aim to communicate complex ideas about systems and processes in a simple, visual way. This education resource prepared by the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, through their "Water: Learn it for Life" program, provides teachers with a detailed lesson plans to take their students through the story of a river to identify the positive and negative features that most influence the health of the waterway.

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During the January 2011 flood, millions of tonnes of soil were washed from the upper catchments into the Brisbane River by fast flowing flood waters. The soil formed a brown plume which extended from the river mouth into Moreton Bay. As the flow of the water slowed, fine soil particles (mud) settled within the Brisbane Estuary and Moreton Bay.

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This document provides guidelines for the successful production of tidal ecosystem health report cards. Specifically, this document serves as an addendum to the Sampling and data analysis protocols for Mid-Atlantic tidal tributary indicators which develops a clear and consistent protocol for the identification, collection, and analysis of the indicator of bacteria.

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Progress in achieving desired environmental outcomes needs to be rigorously measured and reported for effective environmental management. Two major challenges in achieving this are, firstly, how to synthesize monitoring data in a meaningful way at appropriate temporal and spatial scales and, secondly, how to present results in a framework that allows for effective communication to resource managers and scientists as well as a broader general audience.

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Channel heads are the beginning of river networks and thus knowing their location is important in assessing water resources and health threats to fluvial ecosystems. Despite their importance, most channel heads are unmapped. Remote sensing technologies have not yet proven effective under forested canopies, suggesting that predictive models of channel head locations are the best solution to the impracticality of field-mapping the millions of these features that exist in the U.S. alone.

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