The University of Kansas: Journals@KU
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Visual encounter surveys reveal a new population of Black Pine Snakes (Pituophis melanoleucus lodingi) in Mississippi
Get PDFA Flat-tailed House Gecko (Hemidactylus platyurus) preying on a Lesser Brown Scorpion (Isometrus maculatus)
Get PDFTwo new prey items for Baird\u27s Patch-nosed Snake (Salvadora bairdi Jan 1860), in west-central Puebla, Mexico.
Get PDFUse of cave habitat by a Philippine Ratsnake, Coelognathus philippinus (Griffin 1909), in Igang Cave, Tabon Cave Complex, Quezon, Palawan, Philippines
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Ecological Niche Modeling Applications to Infectious Diseases
Get PDFEcological niche modeling (ENM) is a widely used analytical approach for predicting species distributions and has been applied to study spatial epidemiology of infectious diseases. Nevertheless, research evaluating the key components and assumptions of ENM in disease systems remains limited, raising concerns about its robustness, reproducibility, and transparency. To address this limitation, we conducted a systematic review and evaluated articles on ENM applications to infectious diseases between 2020 and 2022. We reviewed 78 articles to extract information following a standard protocol for reporting ENM analysis and summarized the information for each component (e.g., study subject, location, duration). The spatial extent of study areas varied from village to global scales, temporal duration ranged from 1 to 101 years, and the organismal levels ranged from individuals (57.7%) to populations (33.3%). Less frequently reported components included temporal autocorrelation tests (2.7%), algorithmic uncertainty (28.2%), temporal resolution (35.9%), background data selection (44.9%), coordinate reference system (41.0%), model performance from validation data (46.2%), and model averaging (20.5%). Our findings highlight a lack of consistency and transparency in disease ecology and disease biogeography studies, which may lead to misleading ENM applications in spatial epidemiology. Researchers and reviewers applying ENM to disease systems should clearly report key modeling components to ensure biologically sound outputs. This article identified trends and gaps in reporting ENM protocols for mapping disease transmission risk
Evaluation of the knowledge gaps in the reptile records of northwestern Mexico
No full textMexico hosts a great diversity of reptile species; however, many reptiles are either threatened or endangered. Complete and updated information is required to implement appropriate management and conservation actions; however, species inventories can include taxonomic, geographic, and temporal gaps. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the magnitude of these gaps in digitally accessible information on reptiles from the state of Nayarit, located in northwestern Mexico. A database was generated using information from the National Biodiversity Information System (SNIB) of the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). The growth rate of new species descriptions was calculated, and the completeness of the inventory was evaluated in 10-km grid cells across various time periods, considering biogeographic and physiographic regions. The species description growth rate was low. In addition, approximately 40% of the surface of Nayarit exhibited information gaps among reptile records, particularly in mountainous and hard-to-reach areas. Notably, the least amount of information was recorded between 1981 and 2000. Our results lay the groundwork for future research and the development of effective strategies to conserve and manage the natural resources of Nayarit
Incarceration, Harm, and Accountability in Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage
No full textTayari Jones’s 2018 novel An American Marriage depicts the corrosive impact of incarceration on the marriage between Black newlyweds Roy and Celestial after Roy is imprisoned for a rape he did not commit. The novel illustrates the injustices of the American criminal punishment system, not least of which is the harm caused to the families of incarcerated people, as a manifestation of structural racism. Moreover, it both engages with and subverts tropes common to fictional depictions of incarceration that perpetuate reformist imaginings of a safer, kinder prison and suggests instead the efficacy of transformative justice approaches to harm. In doing so, it reveals the increased influence of abolitionist thinking within mainstream discourse on race and incarceration in the United States. It also shows the potential for literary depictions of mass incarceration to move beyond and even challenge the acceptance and normalization of prisons within American society. Contextualizing the novel within this debate and the practices of transformative justice, moreover, helps us to retain focus on the characters are individuals who are accountable for their own choices even as they operate within systems that constrain those choices, as transformative justice also asks us to do
Reparative Birth Work: Black Midwifery and the Disruption of Black Inheritance
No full textFrom The Moynihan Report to The Washington Post’s “Coming White Underclass,” Black maternity has been consistently represented as counter to American progress. This logic is (re)produced via the myth of the “bio-underclass,” which places Black motherhood at the center of the supposed process by which intellectual deficiency leads to bad decisions leads to health problems leads to intellectual deficiency and so on. Christina Sharpe characterizes this process as well, arguing that “the womb” has been turned into “a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold and the prison.” While tackling contemporary concerns, this paper is written from a historical viewpoint, positing obstetrical harm as a particular point of this oppression and recognizing the Black women who were not only exploited and experimented on but whose knowledge of childbirth and healthcare was stolen and undermined in the name of a White masculinist medicalization.
Through my work interviewing birth workers in Los Angeles, I posit contemporary Black midwifery as a reparative blueprint. By working in a mode of preventative care, as opposed to care that takes place after trauma has occurred and poor health has taken its toll, Black midwifery takes an expansive view of health, locating harm both inside and outside the hospital. Via an epigenetic schema, this strategy resists American healthcare’s over emphasis on clear-cut “genetics” and an enduring racial science when approaching Black bodies, as we are neither cared for nor treated with the complicated inheritance of slavery in mind
