Dear colleagues,
With this, our 4th edition of the CRC Quarterly, we are completing our first annual cycle of quarterly updates to our community of readers at CRC member institutions, Chesapeake Bay Program partners, and other interested parties. We, the CRC staff, hope that your interest means you share our mission to facilitate the development and application of good scientific understanding toward sound Chesapeake Bay management. We also hope that you will assist us by sending us your feedback on both the CRC Quarterly and on our newly launched Chesapeake Bay Expertise Database (CBED). For both of these, please tell us: Where can we do better? What features do you enjoy most?
Please send all feedback to CRC-Quarterly@chesapeake.org.
Speaking of CBED, I’m happy to report that we are approaching the 250-member mark and have begun to use the list to send out target notices of opportunities to registrants. By now, 50 of you (randomly selected from the first 100 registrants) have learned that you will soon be receiving Starbuck® coffee cards. For a list of winners, please click here. Please continue to encourage colleagues to register so that CBED will keep growing. If you ever want to edit your own entry, just create a new registration with your name and the changed fields.
With regard to updating your CBED registrations, please note that the CBED registration form now has a new check-box entry for “environmental education” under “expertise” and a new entry for “fostering diversity” under “management areas.” Both are areas where the CRC will be working to develop some new initiatives (and hopefully working with members to develop new sources of funding), so we encourage you to let us know of your interest by updating your registration. In particular, please pay some special attention to the NSF “INCLUDES” funding announcement post in our newsletter. I would love to hear ideas from colleagues about what we might do collectively in response to this RFP, in an effort to foster a more diverse “pipeline” for graduate programs of science, engineering, and management relating to the challenges that face watershed and estuarine management. In fact, I stand ready to lead a proposal in this area if we can form a good collaborative team.
On the funding front, the CRC has worked with its Board members to prepare and send a letter to all US Senators in the six Bay states and all Representatives who represent citizens living in the watershed. A copy of the letter is on our website, as is the list of mailing addresses for Bay region Senators and Representatives. The CRC Board members and I encourage you to write your Congressional representatives to let them know your opinions. Now is an especially important time to reach out to your Senators, as they consider the FY 2018 budget allocations. Many of the federal programs that support the development and application of sound environmental science and policy remain under threat for funding decline, at a time when increases in funding are still needed and have been justified by past success.
Meanwhile if you are like me, you may be sorry to see the days again getting shorter and the duties of a Fall academic semester rapidly approaching. But it is also an exciting time of vacations and rejuvenation, especially important now as we prepare ourselves for the onslaught of effort. In this regard, I know (from much first-hand experience!) that all of our state and federal colleagues in the Chesapeake Bay Program Office (CBPO) have been working even harder than usual over the past year as part of the 2017 TMDL mid-point assessment, and that 2018 will be every bit as active. In this regard, you may wish to find out which of your colleagues are involved with the CBP partnership’s Scientific Technical and Advisory Committee (STAC) and ask them what’s going on. It has really been an incredibly busy year for STAC, with multiple science workshops and reviews completed, under way, and planned. Please see the STAC section of this newsletter to read their latest updates, or explore the CRC and STAC websites for further details.