Between them, the authors of this paper have over sixty years experience in water education working in primary and secondary schools, universities, field study centres, professional development programs; and with community, industry, and government groups, focusing on coastal zones and catchments. Over the last three years, they have undertaken a systematic process of personal and dialogic reflection and deliberation on this experience, particularly in the area of popular education.

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Stream network density exerts a strong influence on ecohydrologic processes in watersheds, yet existing stream maps fail to capture most headwater streams and therefore underestimate stream density. Furthermore, discrepancies between mapped and actual stream length vary between watersheds, confounding efforts to understand the impacts of land use on stream ecosystems.

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The degree to which microbial communities adjust their decomposition of soil carbon over time in response to long-term increases in temperature is one of the key uncertainties in our modeling of the responses of terrestrial ecosystems to warming. To better understand changes in temperature sensitivity of soil microbial communities to long-term increases in soil temperature, we incubated 27 soils for one year with both short-term and long-term manipulations of temperature.

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On Assateague Island, an undeveloped barrier island along Maryland and Virginia, a foredune was constructed to protect the island from the erosion and breaching threat caused by permanent jetties built to maintain Ocean City Inlet. Scientists and engineers integrated expertise in vegetation, wildlife, geomorphology, and coastal engineering in order to design a habitat restoration project that would be evaluated in terms of coastal processes rather than static features.

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The term immersive education is currently used in two educational areas – language education, which involves students being totally immersed in a language and its culture; and virtual education, where teachers use computers and simulation games to immerse learners in a virtual, computer-generated environment that mimics a real-world environment and allows learners to interact with it.

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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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Scientists talk to scientists and educators talk to educators, but seldom do the two camps interact in a collaborative fashion. This gap between science and education results in poor student achievement and a general lack of interest in sciences.

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The northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOMEX) was surveyed to examine the broad-scale spatial patterns and inter-relationships between hypoxia (< 2 mg L-1 dissolved oxygen) and zooplankton biovolume. We used an undulating towed body equipped with sensors for conductivity, temperature, depth, oxygen, fluorescence, and an optical plankton counter to sample water column structure, oxygen, and zooplankton at high spatial resolution (1 m-vertical; 0.25-1 km-horizontal).

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The timing of spring leaf development, trajectories of summer leaf area, and the timing of autumn senescence have profound impacts to the water, carbon, and energy balance of ecosystems, and are likely influenced by global climate change. Limited field-based and remote-sensing observations have suggested complex spatial patterns related to geographic features that influence climate.

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