Evidence from medicine and other fields has shown that gender diversity results in better decision making and outcomes. The incoming workforce of congenital heart specialists (especially in pediatric ...cardiology) appears to be more gender balanced, but past studies have shown many inequities. Gender-associated differences in leadership positions, opportunities presented for academic advancement, and recognition for academic contributions to the field persist. In addition, compensation packages remain disparate if evaluated based on gender with equivalent experience and expertise. This review explores these inequities and has suggested individual and institutional changes that could be made to recruit and retain women, monitor the climate of the institution, and identify and eliminate bias in areas like salary and promotions.
We present the results of a process to attempt to identify 100 questions that, if answered, would make a substantial difference to terrestrial and marine landscape restoration in Europe. ...Representatives from a wide range of European governmental and non-governmental conservation organisations, universities, independent ecologists and land managers compiled 677 questions relating to all aspects of European landscape restoration for nature and people. The questions were shortlisted by an email vote, followed by a two-day workshop, to produce the final list of 100 questions. Many of the final questions evolved through a process of modification and combination as the workshop progressed. The questions are divided into eight sections: conservation of biodiversity; connectivity, migration and translocations; delivering and evaluating restoration; natural processes; ecosystem services; social and cultural aspects of restoration; policy and governance; and economics. We anticipate that these questions will help identify new directions for researchers and policy-makers and assist funders and programme managers in allocating funds and planning projects, resulting in improved understanding and implementation of landscape-scale ecological restoration in Europe.
•We identify 100 questions that, if answered, would enhance ecological restoration.•Questions cover all aspects of landscape restoration in Europe.•A wide range of restoration experts identified questions by voting and discussion.•We hope these will be used by policy-makers, funders and researchers.
An understanding of a species’ diet is required to make sound conservation and management decisions. Traditionally, morphological analyses of undigested hard parts from food items remaining in scats ...have been used to assess diets. More recently, molecular analyses of scats have been used to identify plant and prey species’ DNA, but no studies have compared morphological and molecular diet analyses for large, terrestrial carnivores. We used molecular tools to determine the percentage of black bear and coyote scats that contained 3 common prey species (caribou, moose, and snowshoe hares) in Newfoundland and compared the results to a traditional morphological analysis. We found that a ranking of relative prey frequencies was consistent between the 2 methods, but molecular methods tended to detect prey species in a greater percentage of scats for all prey species. However, there were individual scats in which a prey species was detected by morphological methods only, and we provide evidence that molecular methods could result in false negatives if prey DNA is not uniformly distributed throughout a scat or as a result of PCR inconsistency. We also found that the per sample cost comparison between morphological and molecular analyses was dependent upon whether or not a molecular test was needed to identify scats to the predator species, the cost of developing molecular methods, and the number of samples being processed. We recommend that controlled feeding studies be performed to validate molecular methods and investigate the utility of molecular techniques to estimate the proportions of food items consumed.
Physical experiments were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of bed load particle impacts as a mechanism of lateral bedrock erosion. In addition, we explored how changes in channel bed roughness, as ...would occur during development of an alluvial cover, influence rates of lateral erosion. Experimental channels were constructed to have erodible walls and a nonerodible bed using different mixtures of sand and cement. Bed roughness was varied along the length of the channel by embedding sediment particles of different size in the channel bed mixture. Lateral wall erosion from clear‐water flow was negligible. Lateral erosion during periods in which bed load was supplied to the channel removed as much as 3% of the initial wetted cross‐sectional area. The vertical distribution of erosion was limited to the base of the channel wall, producing channels with undercut banks. The addition of roughness elements to an otherwise smooth bed caused rates of lateral erosion to increase by as much as a factor of 7 during periods of bed load supply. However, a minimum roughness element diameter of approximately half the median bed load particle diameter was required before a substantial increase in erosion was observed. Beyond this minimum threshold size, further increases in the relative size of roughness elements did not substantially change the rate of wall erosion despite changes in total boundary shear stress. The deflection of saltating bed load particles into the channel wall by fixed roughness elements is hypothesized to be the driver of the observed increase in lateral erosion rates.
Key Points
Bed load particle impacts are an effective mechanism of lateral bedrock erosion
Wall impacts are driven by deflection of bed load particles by roughness elements
Rate of lateral erosion not linearly related to total boundary shear stress
Background Little evidence exists on the role of socio-economic position (SEP) in early life on adult disease other than for cardiovascular mortality; data is often retrospective. We assess whether ...childhood SEP influences disease risk in mid-life, separately from the effect of adult position, and establish how associations vary across multiple measures of disease risk. Methods Prospective follow-up to adulthood of all born in England, Scotland and Wales during 1 week in 1958, and with medical data at age 45 years (n = 9377). Outcomes include: blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c), total and high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, triglycerides, fibrinogen, total immunoglobulin E (IgE), one-second forced expiratory volume (FEV1), hearing threshold (4 kHz), visual impairment, symptoms of depression and anxiety, chronic widespread pain. Results Social class in childhood was associated with blood pressure, BMI, HbA1c, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, fibrinogen, FEV1, hearing threshold, depressive symptoms and chronic widespread pain, with a general trend of deteriorating health from class I to V. Adult social class was also associated with these measures. Mutually adjusted analyses of child and adult social class suggest that both contribute to disease risk in mid-life: in general, associations for childhood class were as strong as for adult class. Individuals with a manual class at both time-points tended to have the greatest health deficits in adulthood. Conclusions Adverse SEP in childhood is associated with a poorer health profile in mid-adulthood, independently of adult social position, and across diverse measures of disease risk and physical and mental functioning.
•Treatment de-escalation in HPV+ oropharynx cancer is an active area of research.•A Bayesian phase II trial of MR-guided radiotherapy dose adaptation is proposed.•High dose volume will be adapted on ...weekly MRI based on tumor response.•The non-inferiority of dose adaptation compared to standard IMRT will be assessed.
Current standard radiotherapy for oropharynx cancer (OPC) is associated with high rates of severe toxicities, shown to adversely impact patients’ quality of life. Given excellent outcomes of human papilloma virus (HPV)-associated OPC and long-term survival of these typically young patients, treatment de-intensification aimed at improving survivorship while maintaining excellent disease control is now a central concern. The recent implementation of magnetic resonance image – guided radiotherapy (MRgRT) systems allows for individual tumor response assessment during treatment and offers possibility of personalized dose-reduction. In this 2-stage Bayesian phase II study, we propose to examine weekly radiotherapy dose-adaptation based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) evaluated tumor response. Individual patient’s plan will be designed to optimize dose reduction to organs at risk and minimize locoregional failure probability based on serial MRI during RT. Our primary aim is to assess the non-inferiority of MRgRT dose adaptation for patients with low risk HPV-associated OPC compared to historical control, as measured by Bayesian posterior probability of locoregional control (LRC).
Patients with T1-2 N0-2b (as per AJCC 7th Edition) HPV-positive OPC, with lymph node <3 cm and <10 pack-year smoking history planned for curative radiotherapy alone to a dose of 70 Gy in 33 fractions will be eligible. All patients will undergo pre-treatment MRI and at least weekly intra-treatment MRI. Patients undergoing MRgRT will have weekly adaptation of high dose planning target volume based on gross tumor volume response. The stage 1 of this study will enroll 15 patients to MRgRT dose adaptation. If LRC at 6 months with MRgRT dose adaptation is found sufficiently safe as per the Bayesian model, stage 2 of the protocol will expand enrollment to an additional 60 patients, randomized to either MRgRT or standard IMRT.
Multiple methods for safe treatment de-escalation in patients with HPV-positive OPC are currently being studied. By leveraging the ability of advanced MRI techniques to visualize tumor and soft tissues through the course of treatment, this protocol proposes a workflow for safe personalized radiation dose-reduction in good responders with radiosensitive tumors, while ensuring tumoricidal dose to more radioresistant tumors. MRgRT dose adaptation could translate in reduced long term radiation toxicities and improved survivorship while maintaining excellent LRC outcomes in favorable OPC.
ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03224000; Registration date: 07/21/2017.
We develop a likelihood analysis framework for fitting spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models to data collected on class structured or stratified populations. Our interest is motivated by the ...necessity of accommodating the problem of missing observations of individual class membership. This is particularly problematic in SCR data arising from DNA analysis of scat, hair or other material, which frequently yields individual identity but fails to identify the sex. Moreover, this can represent a large fraction of the data and, given the typically small sample sizes of many capture-recapture studies based on DNA information, utilization of the data with missing sex information is necessary. We develop the class structured likelihood for the case of missing covariate values, and then we address the scaling of the likelihood so that models with and without class structured parameters can be formally compared regardless of missing values. We apply our class structured model to black bear data collected in New York in which sex could be determined for only 62 of 169 uniquely identified individuals. The models containing sex-specificity of both the intercept of the SCR encounter probability model and the distance coefficient, and including a behavioral response are strongly favored by log-likelihood. Estimated population sex ratio is strongly influenced by sex structure in model parameters illustrating the importance of rigorous modeling of sex differences in capture-recapture models.
We present avidity sequencing, a sequencing chemistry that separately optimizes the processes of stepping along a DNA template and that of identifying each nucleotide within the template. Nucleotide ...identification uses multivalent nucleotide ligands on dye-labeled cores to form polymerase-polymer-nucleotide complexes bound to clonal copies of DNA targets. These polymer-nucleotide substrates, termed avidites, decrease the required concentration of reporting nucleotides from micromolar to nanomolar and yield negligible dissociation rates. Avidity sequencing achieves high accuracy, with 96.2% and 85.4% of base calls having an average of one error per 1,000 and 10,000 base pairs, respectively. We show that the average error rate of avidity sequencing remained stable following a long homopolymer.
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