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Carbon stocks and productivity in mangroves under climate change: regional and global perspectives
Get PDFThe Development of Virtual Videoconference-Based Support for People Living with Rare Dementias and Their Carers: Protocol for Support Group Evaluation
Get PDFBackground:People living with rarer dementias face considerable difficulty accessing tailored information, advice and peer and professional support. Online meeting platforms offer a critical opportunity to connect with others with shared lived experiences even if geographically dispersed, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.Objective:Our objective was to develop facilitated videoconferencing support groups (VSGs) tailored to people living with or caring for someone with familial or sporadic frontotemporal dementia (fFTD or FTD) or young onset Alzheimer’s disease (fAD or YOAD) , primary progressive aphasia (PPA), posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) or Lewy body dementia (LBD). This paper describes the development, co-production, field-testing, and the evaluation plan for these groups.Methods:We describe a three-phase approach to development. First, information and knowledge were gathered as part of a co-production process with members of the Rare Dementia Support (RDS) service. This information, together with literature searches and consultation with experts by experience, clinicians and academics, shaped the design of the VSGs and session themes. Second, field testing involved 154 RDS members (people living with dementia and carers) participating in two rounds of facilitated sessions across 7 themes (health and social care professionals, advance care planning, independence and identity, grief and loss, empowering your identity, couples, hope and dementia). Third, a detailed evaluation plan for future rounds of VSGs was developed.Results:The development of the small groups programme yielded content and structure for 9 themed VSGs (the 7 piloted themes plus a later stages programme and creativity club for implementation in round 3 and beyond) to be delivered over 4-8 sessions. The evaluation plan incorporated a range of quantitative (attendance, demographics and geography; pre-/post- wellbeing ratings and surveys; psycholinguistic analysis of conversation; facial emotion recognition; facilitator ratings; economic analysis of programme delivery) and qualitative (content and thematic analysis) approaches. Pilot data from round 2 groups on the pre-/post-three word surveys indicated an increase in the emotional valence of words selected after sessions.Conclusions:The involvement of people with lived experience of a rare dementia was critical to the design, development and delivery of the small virtual support group programme, and evaluation of this programme will yield convergent data about the impact of tailored support delivered to geographically dispersed communities
Tree Planting for Climate Change: Coverage in the UK Farming Sector Press
Get PDFIn recent years tree planting as a response to climate change has acquired a very high profile amongst policy-makers, scientists, the media, and the public. This ‘afforestation’, however, requires space: that is, land. Agriculture currently occupies very large areas of land globally meaning that it is commonly targeted as needing to make way for tree planting, and making farmers important gatekeepers to this climate change mitigation strategy. Given the importance of farming sector media outlets in reflecting, shaping and leading values and attitudes amongst the agricultural community, this paper investigates how tree planting is presented within the UK's two leading sectoral publications, Farmers Guardian and Farmers Weekly. We sample coverage at four points over a two-year period (2019–2021) which began with high-profile national media and scientific engagement with the topic. Our analysis reveals very low levels of coverage within these key publications with, on average, just 1 in 200 articles within our sample focussing on tree planting. Within this limited coverage we identify four themes which range from hostility towards the notion of trees on farms replacing agricultural practices, through to occasional recognition of the positive roles that trees on farms can play in climate change mitigation. Arguably, the lack of legitimisation within the coverage constitutes a significant barrier to woodland expansion on agricultural land. We conclude that farming media outlets could play a much stronger role in supporting the agricultural community to understand how it could contribute to climate change mitigation through bringing trees ‘in’ to farming systems, and to the normalisation of this within modern farming culture
Helping the poor and the vulnerable with their energy bills during the energy crisis of 2022/2023 in the UK
Get PDFWe need to ‘redistribute’ taxpayers’ money to the poor and the most vulnerable. The government has already allocated £400 a year for every household in the United Kingdom, and this money has already been included in the government’s budget for the next six months (October 2022-March 2023). Liz Truss promised that this support would be for the next two years, but the current Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has said that this support will be reviewed after six months. So, let’s reallocate this financial support to those who need it the most, as soon as possible
A Conceptual Model for Detecting Small-Scale Forest Disturbances Based on Ecosystem Morphological Traits
Get PDFCurrent LiDAR-based methods for detecting forest change use a host of statistically selected variables which typically lack a biological link with the characteristics of the ecosystem. Consensus of the literature indicates that many authors use LiDAR to derive ecosystem morphological traits (EMTs)-namely, vegetation height, vegetation cover, and vertical structural complexity-to identify small-scale changes in forest ecosystems. Here, we provide a conceptual, biological model for predicting forest aboveground biomass (AGB) change based on EMTs. We show that through use of a multitemporal dataset it is possible to not only identify losses caused by logging in the period between data collection but also identify regions of regrowth from prior logging using EMTs. This sensitivity to the change in forest dynamics was the criterion by which LiDAR metrics were selected as proxies for each EMT. For vegetation height, results showed that the top-of-canopy height derived from a canopy height model was more sensitive to logging than the average or high percentile of raw LiDAR height distributions. For vegetation cover metrics, lower height thresholds for fractional cover calculations were more sensitive to selective logging and the regeneration of understory. For describing the structural complexity in the vertical profile, the Gini coefficient was found to be superior to foliage height diversity for detecting the dynamics occurring over the years after logging. The subsequent conceptual model for AGB estimation obtained a level of accuracy which was comparable to a model that was statistically optimised for that same area. We argue that a widespread adoption of an EMT-based conceptual approach would improve the transferability and comparability of LiDAR models for AGB worldwide
Bacteriophages pass through candle-shaped porous ceramic filters: Application for the collection of viruses in soil water
Get PDFDespite the ubiquity of viruses in soils, their diversity in soil water has not been explored, mainly due to the difficulty of collecting them. In hydrology, soil water is usually collected using porous candles. This study proposes using these porous candles as a new tool for sampling viruses in soil water to analyze their passage through the ceramic part of the candles. The recovery of the viruses was determined after filtration under laboratory conditions using three model bacteriophages (MS2, ΦX174, and Φ6) and Escherichia coli, at neutral and acidic pH. Then, a field experiment was carried out where soil water filtration and viral identification by metagenomic shotgun were performed. At neutral pH, all bacteriophages tested successfully passed through the porous candles during the filtration process, with reductions of 0.02 log, 0.16 log, and 0.55 log for MS2 ΦX174 and Φ6, respectively. At pH 4.4, the passage of MS2 was not affected while ΦX174 underwent a slight reduction in recovery, probably caused by adsorption onto the filter material. Regarding the application of the porous candles in the field, the results obtained allowed the successful recovery of viruses, exposing porous candles as a new method suitable for the collection of viruses from soil water in the context of the study of viral communities
Changes in Primary Somatosensory Cortex Following Allogeneic Hand Transplantation or Autogenic Hand Replantation
Get PDFFormer amputees who undergo allogeneic hand transplantation or autogenic hand replantation (jointly, "hand restoration") present a unique opportunity to measure the range of post-deafferentation plastic changes in the nervous system, especially primary somatosensory cortex (S1). However, few such patients exist, and previous studies compared single cases to small groups of typical adults. Here, we studied 5 individuals (n = 8 sessions: a transplant with 2 sessions, a transplant with 3 sessions, and three replants with 1 session each). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure S1 responsiveness to controlled pneumatic tactile stimulation delivered to each patient's left and right fingertips and lower face. These data were compared with responses acquired from typical adults (n = 29) and current unilateral amputees (n = 19). During stimulation of the affected hand, patients' affected S1 (contralateral to affected hand) responded to stimulation in a manner similar both to amputees and to typical adults. The presence of contralateral responses indicated grossly typical S1 function, but responses were universally at the low end of the range of typical variability. Patients' affected S1 showed substantial individual variability in responses to stimulation of the intact hand: while all patients fell within the range of typical adults, some patient sessions (4/8) had substantial ipsilateral responses similar to those exhibited by current amputees. Unlike hand restoration patients, current amputees exhibited substantial S1 reorganization compared to typical adults, including bilateral S1 responses to stimulation of the intact hand. In all three participant groups, we assessed tactile localization by measuring individuals' ability to identify the location of touch on the palm and fingers. Curiously, while transplant patients improved their tactile sensory localization over time, this was uncorrelated with changes in S1 responses to tactile stimuli. Overall, our results provide the first description of cortical responses to well-controlled tactile stimulation after hand restoration. Our case studies indicate that hand restoration patients show S1 function within the range of both typical adults and amputees, but with low-amplitude and individual-specific responses that indicate a wide range of potential cortical neurological changes following de-afferentation and re-afferentation.</p
Improving decision making in the management of hospital readmissions using modern survival analysis techniques
Get PDFHospital readmissions lead to unnecessary demand for healthcare resources, greater financial costs, and poorer patient outcomes. These consequences have led hospitals to attempt to identify high-risk patients with predictive models, but research has rarely focused on survival analysis techniques, model applications, and performance measures. This study establishes the uses of survival models to support managerial decision-making for readmissions. First, machine learning and statistical survival techniques are applied, ten of which have not been used in previous readmission research. Secondly, applications of survival models in a decision support capacity are proposed, relating to intervention targeting, follow-up care customisation, and demand forecasting. Thirdly, performance measures for the proposed applications are determined and used for empirical model assessment. These performance measures have not been applied in previous readmission research. The empirical assessment is based on adult admissions to the Emergency Department of Gold Coast University Hospital (n = 46,659) and Robina Hospital (n = 23,976) in Queensland, Australia. The relevant aspects of performance were determined to be discrimination and calibration, as measured by time-dependent concordance and D-Calibration respectively. A range of discrimination and calibration combinations can be achieved by different models, with the Recursively Imputed Survival Tree, Cox regression, and hybrid Cox-ANN techniques being most promising. Survival approaches linking techniques, proposed applications, and performance measurement should be given greater consideration in future healthcare research and in institutions aiming to manage readmissions.<br/
Continuous removal of sulfate and metals from acidic mining-impacted waters at low temperature using a sulfate-reducing bacterial consortium
Get PDFThe aim of this study was to develop a biological method for the simultaneous removal of sulfate and metals from acidic low-temperature mining effluents. A mixed consortium of cold-tolerant sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) and other microorganisms was immobilized on glass beads and exploited in an up-flow biofilm reactor for the continuous treatment of actual and synthetic mining-impacted waters (MIWs) with initial sulfate concentrations between 1580 and 5350 mg L-1. The proton acidity of the mine waters was neutralized by microbial sulfidogenesis. Metals present in the MIWs were precipitated either off-line or in-line, inside the reactor vessel. High sulfate reduction rates (SRRs), from 1000 to 4500 mg L-1 d-1 at a temperature of 11.7 ± 0.2 °C, were achieved (sulfate removal 43–87%). The bacterial consortium was found to be robust and resistant to changes in growth conditions during the bioreactor experiment. The relative abundance of SRB and the SRR increased at higher sulfate concentrations. Sulfidogenic bioreactors have the potential for treatment of acid mine drainage even at low temperature. It was demonstrated that neutral reactor conditions and high SRRs were maintained when acidic influent was fed into the reactor