Please join the Great Lakes Center and Biology Department for a seminar titled “How is Your Ecosystem Doing? Developing Scientifically Based Report Cards”, presented by Dr. William Dennison from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, to be held Friday, September 30th from 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. in Technology Building room 160. All students, staff and faculty are welcome.
Seminar Abstract: A basic question that is asked by scientists, resource managers, policy makers and interested citizens is simply “How is your ecosystem doing?” When I was asked this question regarding an embayment that I had been studying in Australia, I gathered my graduate students and developed a simple qualitative report card (A-F) in the late 1990s. Years later I set about to develop a report card using an established monitoring program. This resulted in the Chesapeake Bay report card, which was incorporated into governance structures and supported restoration targeting. Several other report cards were undertaken, but the largest report card effort was devoted to the extensive Mississippi River basin, and it included various socio-economic indicators as well as ecological indicators. Partnering with WWF, our team is now developing strategies for report card replication and multiplication in a Basin Report Card Initiative. I would like to propose a Great Lakes report card, and will present some preliminary concepts to answer the question “How are the Great Lakes doing?”
Some content on this page is saved in PDF format. To view these files, download Adobe Acrobat Reader free. If you are having trouble reading a document, request an accessible copy of the PDF or Word Document.