Forest edges influence more than half of the world's forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in ...heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantifying edge impacts in heterogeneous landscapes to quantify edge-determined changes in abundance of 1,673 vertebrate species. We show that the abundances of 85% of species are affected, either positively or negatively, by forest edges. Species that live in the centre of the forest (forest core), that were more likely to be listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), reached peak abundances only at sites farther than 200-400 m from sharp high-contrast forest edges. Smaller-bodied amphibians, larger reptiles and medium-sized non-volant mammals experienced a larger reduction in suitable habitat than other forest-core species. Our results highlight the pervasive ability of forest edges to restructure ecological communities on a global scale.
Abstract
Outdoor and nature-based recreation provides countless social benefits, yet public land managers often lack information on the spatial and temporal extent of recreation activities. Social ...media is a promising source of data to fill information gaps because the amount of recreational use is positively correlated with social media activity. However, despite the implication that these correlations could be employed to accurately estimate visitation, there are no known transferable models parameterized for use with multiple social media data sources. This study tackles these issues by examining the relative value of multiple sources of social media in models that estimate visitation at unmonitored sites and times across multiple destinations. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 social media posts and 286,000 observed visits from two regions in the United States, we compare multiple competing statistical models for estimating visitation. We find social media data substantially improve visitor estimates at unmonitored sites, even when a model is parameterized with data from another region. Visitation estimates are further improved when models are parameterized with on-site counts. These findings indicate that while social media do not fully substitute for on-site data, they are a powerful component of recreation research and visitor management.
Risk of recurrent stillbirth: a cohort study Wood, SL; Tang, S
BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology,
October 2021, Volume:
128, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Objectives
To evaluate the recurrence risk of stillbirth.
Design
Retrospective cohort study.
Setting and population
All births 1992–2017, Alberta, Canada.
Methods
Retrospective cohort study.
Main ...outcome measures
Stillbirth was defined as the death in utero of a fetus with gestational age ≥20 weeks or weighing ≥500 g. Stillbirths were further subdivided into those occurring before labour and those in labour.
Results
We identified 744 897 births from 308 478 women. Of these, 3698 women experienced a stillbirth and, of these, 97.7%, experienced only one. For women with a small‐for‐gestational‐ age stillbirth in the first birth, their risk of a subsequent antepartum stillbirth was increased substantially: 4.09%, relative risk (RR) 10.39, 95% CI 5.81–18.59. For women with a first birth appropriate‐for‐gestational‐age stillbirth with no risk factors such as pregnancy induced hypertension, the risk with pre‐existing diabetes mellitus or hypertension was also increased but to a much lesser degree (RR 2.46, 95% CI 1.23–4.91). For women who had experienced a first birth intrapartum stillbirth, the risk of another intrapartum stillbirth was very high (3.59%, RR 36.50, 95% CI 20.17–66.05). Most of these births also occurred prior to 24 weeks’ gestation: 83% (10/12).
Conclusions
The risk of recurrent antepartum stillbirth is low. The increase in risk in instances where the antepartum stillbirth was not growth‐restricted is not clinically meaningful. Given the very low risk in any given gestational week, fetal surveillance is unlikely to be effective and may lead to unnecessary interventions. Intrapartum stillbirth has a very high recurrence risk but may not be preventable.
Tweetable
Stillbirth recurrence is rare.
Tweetable
Stillbirth recurrence is rare.
The Enhanced Recovery After Surgery Society guideline for intraoperative care in cesarean delivery will provide best practice, evidenced-based, recommendations for intraoperative care, with primarily ...a maternal focus. The “focused” pathway process for scheduled and unscheduled cesarean delivery for this Enhanced Recovery After Surgery cesarean delivery guideline will consider procedure from the decision to operate (starting with the 30–60 minutes before skin incision) through the surgery. The literature search (1966–2017) used Embase and PubMed to search medical subject headings including “cesarean section,” “cesarean section,” “cesarean section delivery,” and all pre- and intraoperative Enhanced Recovery After Surgery items. Study selection allowed titles and abstracts to be screened by individual reviewers to identify potentially relevant articles. Metaanalyses, systematic reviews, randomized controlled studies, nonrandomized controlled studies, reviews, and case series were considered for each individual topic. Quality assessment and data analyses evaluated the quality of evidence and recommendations were evaluated according to the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation system as used and described in previous Enhanced Recovery After Surgery Society guidelines. The Enhanced Recovery After Surgery cesarean delivery guideline/pathway has created a maternal focused pathway (for scheduled and unscheduled surgery starting from 30–60 minutes before skin incision to maternal discharge) with Enhanced Recovery After Surgery–directed preoperative elements, intraoperative elements, and postoperative elements. Specifics of the intraoperative care included the use of prophylactic antibiotics before the cesarean delivery, appropriate patient warming intraoperatively, blunt expansion of the transverse uterine hysterotomy, skin closure with subcuticular sutures, and delayed cord clamping. A number of specific elements of intraoperative care of women who undergo cesarean delivery are recommended based on the evidence. The Enhanced Recovery After Surgery Society guideline for intraoperative care in cesarean delivery will provide best practice, evidenced-based, recommendations for intraoperative care with primarily a maternal focus. When the cesarean delivery pathway (elements/processes) is studied, implemented, audited, evaluated, and optimized by maternity care teams, this will create an opportunity for the focused and optimized areas of care and recommendations to be further enhanced.
Aims
To determine if in‐target intrapartum glucose control is associated with neonatal hypoglycaemia in women with type 1, type 2 or gestational diabetes.
Methods
This was a retrospective cohort ...study of pregnant women with diabetes and their neonates. The primary exposure was in‐target glucose control, defined as all capillary glucose values within the range 3.5–6.5 mmol/l during the intrapartum period. The primary outcome, neonatal hypoglycaemia, was defined as treatment with intravenous dextrose therapy. Multiple logistic regression was used to examine the association between maternal intrapartum glycaemic control and neonatal hypoglycaemia, adjusting for covariates.
Results
Intrapartum glucose testing was available for 157 (86.3%), 267 (76.3%) and 3256 (52.4%) women with type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes, respectively. In the univariate analysis, in‐target glycaemic control was significantly associated with neonatal hypoglycaemia in women with gestational diabetes, but not in women with type 1 or 2 diabetes. However, after adjustment for important neonatal factors (large for gestational age, preterm delivery and infant sex), intrapartum in‐target glycaemic control was not significantly associated with neonatal hypoglycaemia in women regardless of diabetes type adjusted odds ratios 0.4 (95% CI 0.1, 1.4), 0.7 (95% CI 0.3, 1.3) and 0.7 (95% CI 0.5, 1.0) for women with type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes, respectively.
Conclusions
There was no significant association between in‐target glycaemic control and neonatal hypoglycaemia after adjustment for neonatal factors. Given the high risk of maternal hypoglycaemia and the resources required, future trials should consider whether more relaxed intrapartum glycaemic targets may be safer and yield similar neonatal outcomes.
What's new?
In pregnancies with diabetes, guidelines recommend tight intrapartum glycaemic control based on the theory that this will decrease the risk of neonatal hypoglycaemia; however, the evidence supporting this theory is conflicting.
In this large cohort of women with type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes, there was no significant association between in‐target intrapartum glycaemic control and severe neonatal hypoglycaemia after adjustment for neonatal confounders.
Future trials should consider whether more relaxed intrapartum glycaemic targets may be safer in women with diabetes in pregnancy and yield similar neonatal results or outcomes.
The annual photoperiod cycle provides the critical environmental cue synchronizing rhythms of life in seasonal habitats. In 1936, Bünning proposed a circadian-based coincidence timer for ...photoperiodic synchronization in plants. Formal studies support the universality of this so-called coincidence timer, but we lack understanding of the mechanisms involved. Here we show in mammals that long photoperiods induce the circadian transcription factor BMAL2, in the pars tuberalis of the pituitary, and triggers summer biology through the eyes absent/thyrotrophin (EYA3/TSH) pathway. Conversely, long-duration melatonin signals on short photoperiods induce circadian repressors including DEC1, suppressing BMAL2 and the EYA3/TSH pathway, triggering winter biology. These actions are associated with progressive genome-wide changes in chromatin state, elaborating the effect of the circadian coincidence timer. Hence, circadian clock-pituitary epigenetic pathway interactions form the basis of the mammalian coincidence timer mechanism. Our results constitute a blueprint for circadian-based seasonal timekeeping in vertebrates.
The impact of donor‐specific HLA alloantibodies (DSA) on short‐ and long‐term liver transplant outcome is not clearly defined. While it is clear that not all levels of allosensitization produce overt ...clinical injury, and that liver allografts possess some degree of alloantibody resistance, alloantibody‐mediated adverse consequences are increasingly being recognized. To better define the current state of this topic, we assembled experts to provide insights, explore controversies and develop recommendations for future research on the consequences of DSA in liver transplantation. This article summarizes the proceedings of this inaugural meeting. Several insights emerged. Acute antibody‐mediated rejection (AMR), although rarely diagnosed, is increasingly understood to overlap with T cell–mediated rejection. Isolated liver allograft recipients are at increased risk of early allograft immunologic injury when preformed DSA are high titer and persist posttransplantation. Persons who undergo simultaneous liver–kidney transplantation are at risk of renal AMR when Class II DSA persist posttransplantation. Other under‐appreciated DSA associations include ductopenia and fibrosis, plasma cell hepatitis, biliary strictures and accelerated fibrosis associated with recurrent liver disease. Standardized DSA testing and diagnostic criteria for both acute and chronic AMR are needed to distil existing associations into etiological processes in order to develop responsive therapeutic strategies.
Assembled experts provide insights, explore controversies, and develop recommendations for future research on the consequences of donor‐specific alloantibodies in liver transplantation.
We observed a syndrome of intermittent fevers, early-onset lacunar strokes and other neurovascular manifestations, livedoid rash, hepatosplenomegaly, and systemic vasculopathy in three unrelated ...patients. We suspected a genetic cause because the disorder presented in early childhood.
We performed whole-exome sequencing in the initial three patients and their unaffected parents and candidate-gene sequencing in three patients with a similar phenotype, as well as two young siblings with polyarteritis nodosa and one patient with small-vessel vasculitis. Enzyme assays, immunoblotting, immunohistochemical testing, flow cytometry, and cytokine profiling were performed on samples from the patients. To study protein function, we used morpholino-mediated knockdowns in zebrafish and short hairpin RNA knockdowns in U937 cells cultured with human dermal endothelial cells.
All nine patients carried recessively inherited mutations in CECR1 (cat eye syndrome chromosome region, candidate 1), encoding adenosine deaminase 2 (ADA2), that were predicted to be deleterious; these mutations were rare or absent in healthy controls. Six patients were compound heterozygous for eight CECR1 mutations, whereas the three patients with polyarteritis nodosa or small-vessel vasculitis were homozygous for the p.Gly47Arg mutation. Patients had a marked reduction in the levels of ADA2 and ADA2-specific enzyme activity in the blood. Skin, liver, and brain biopsies revealed vasculopathic changes characterized by compromised endothelial integrity, endothelial cellular activation, and inflammation. Knockdown of a zebrafish ADA2 homologue caused intracranial hemorrhages and neutropenia - phenotypes that were prevented by coinjection with nonmutated (but not with mutated) human CECR1. Monocytes from patients induced damage in cocultured endothelial-cell layers.
Loss-of-function mutations in CECR1 were associated with a spectrum of vascular and inflammatory phenotypes, ranging from early-onset recurrent stroke to systemic vasculopathy or vasculitis. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health Intramural Research Programs and others.).
Soils play a critical role in the cycling of water, energy, and carbon in the Earth system. Until recently, due primarily to a lack of soil property maps of a sufficiently high‐quality and spatial ...detail, a minor emphasis has been placed on providing high‐resolution measured soil parameter estimates for land surface models and hydrologic models. This study introduces Probabilistic Remapping of SSURGO (POLARIS) soil properties—a database of 30‐m probabilistic soil property maps over the contiguous United States (CONUS). The mapped variables over CONUS include soil texture, organic matter, pH, saturated hydraulic conductivity, Brooks‐Corey and Van Genuchten water retention curve parameters, bulk density, and saturated water content. POLARIS soil properties was assembled by (1) depth harmonizing and aggregating the pedons in the National Cooperative Soil Survey Soil Characterization Database and the components in Soil Survey Geographic Database into a database of 21,481 different soil series, each soil series having its own vertical profiles of different soil properties, (2) pruning the original POLARIS soil series maps using conventional soil maps to improve soil series prediction accuracy, and (3) merging the assembled soil series databases with the pruned POLARIS soil series maps to construct the soil property maps over CONUS. POLARIS soil properties includes 100‐bin histograms for each layer and variable per grid cell and a series of summary statistics at 30‐, 300‐, and 3,000‐m spatial resolution. Evaluation of POLARIS soil properties using in situ measurements shows an average R2 of 0.41, normalized root‐mean‐square error of 12%, and a normalized mean absolute error of 8.8%.
Key Points
This study introduces POLARIS soil properties, a probabilistic 30‐m soil property maps over the contiguous United States
POLARIS soil properties provides improved local prior distributions of soil parameters for land surface and hydrologic models
In situ evaluation shows an average R2 of 0.41, a normalized root‐mean‐square error of 12%, and a normalized mean absolute error of 8.8%
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•Dilution, settlement, and membrane filtration to valorise digestate.•Digestate optimised as a waste-based medium for Chlorella vulgaris cultivation.•Mechanical treatment separated ...liquid and solid fractions and recovered nutrients.•C. vulgaris performed better with low concentrations of processed digestate (2.5%)•C. vulgaris growth on digestate is scalable and converts excess nutrients to biomass.
Digestate produced from the anaerobic digestion of food and farm waste is primarily returned to land as a biofertiliser for crops, with its potential to generate value through alternative processing methods at present under explored. In this work, valorisation of a digestate resulting from the treatment of kitchen and food waste was investigated, using dilution, settlement and membrane processing technology. Processed digestate was subsequently tested as a nutrient source for the cultivation of Chlorella vulgaris, up to pilot-scale (800L). Dilution of digestate down to 2.5% increased settlement rate and induced release of valuable compounds for fertiliser usage such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Settlement, as a partial processing of digestate offered a physical separation of liquid and solid fractions at a low cost. Membrane filtration demonstrated efficient segregation of nutrients, with micro-filtration recovering 92.38% of phosphorus and the combination of micro-filtration, ultra-filtration, and nano-filtration recovering a total of 94.35% of nitrogen from digestate. Nano-filtered and micro-filtered digestates at low concentrations were suitable substrates to support growth of Chlorella vulgaris. At pilot-scale, the microalgae grew successfully for 28 days with a maximum growth rate of 0.62 day−1 and dry weight of 0.86 g⋅L−1. Decline in culture growth beyond 28 days was presumably linked to ammonium and heavy metal accumulation in the cultivation medium. Processed digestate provided a suitable nutrient source for successful microalgal cultivation at pilot-scale, evidencing potential to convert excess nutrients into biomass, generating value from excess digestate and providing additional markets to the anaerobic digestion sector.
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