Theory predicts that species requiring multiple habitat types simultaneously should have heightened sensitivity to anthropogenic pressures, yet tests of this prediction are especially rare. We tested ...whether breeding site occupancy of the threatened marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) was driven by the synergistic effects of nesting habitat loss in forests, and changing ocean conditions. We paired 70,700 murrelet surveys at 19,837 sites across 20 years from the Oregon Coast Range with annual data on the extent of old forest and biophysical ocean conditions. Dynamic occupancy models indicated that local murrelet colonization rates were strongly reduced during warm ocean conditions with low prey availability. Landscapes that contained more old forest and were closer to the ocean showed reduced rates of local extinction. Given predictions of accelerated ocean warming and increased global timber demand, our results suggest murrelets may continue to be imperiled by deterioration of the two habitats upon which they depend.
To determine whether electronic health record (EHR) documentation of certain early childhood risk factors for asthma, such as wheeze differ by race, ethnicity, and language group, and whether these ...children have different subsequent asthma prevalences.
We used EHR data from the Accelerating Data Value Across a National Community Health Center (ADVANCE) Clinical Research Network from children receiving care in US community health centers (n = 71,259 children) across 21 states to examine the presence of ICD-coded documentation of early childhood wheeze and its association with subsequent asthma diagnosis documentation in the EHR by race/ethnicity/language.
ICD-coded wheeze was present in 2 to 3% of each race/ethnicity/language group. Among the total sample, 18.5% had asthma diagnosed after age 4. The adjusted prevalence of subsequent asthma diagnosis was greater in children with wheeze than those without. Odds of asthma diagnosis did not differ among children in all race/ethnicity/language groups with early childhood wheeze. Non-Latino Black children without wheeze had higher odds of asthma (OR = 1.19, 95% CI = 1.08-1.32) compared with non-Latino White children without wheeze.
In US community health centers which serve medically underserved populations, EHR documentation of early childhood wheeze was uncommon and did not differ significantly among race/ethnicity/language groups. Differences in asthma diagnosis in Latinos may not stem from differences in early-life wheeze documentation. However, our findings suggest that there may be opportunities for improvement in early asthma symptom recognition for non-Latino Black children, especially in those without early childhood wheeze.
•Remotely identifying behavior may help make informed time sensitive decisions.•Direct accelerometer metrics require less processing than predicting behaviors.•Accelerometers can remotely detect ...parturition on hourly and daily scale.
Identifying and monitoring parturition of individual animals may help producers increase attentiveness, enabling early detection of dystocia during parturition. Parturition events are marked by subtle behavioral changes often difficult to detect by observation alone. The aim of this study was to determine the ability of tri-axial accelerometer data to accurately identify and predict parturition-related behavior of mature ewes in a pen setting. Tri-axial accelerometers recording at 12.5 Hz were placed on ear tags and attached to 13 Debouillet mature ewes before parturition. Activity was monitored 7 days prior to lambing (d −7); on the day of lambing (d 0); and 7 days post lambing (d +7). Using random forest machine learning, accelerometer data and visual observations were used to predict (i) seven mutually-exclusive behaviors; and (ii) activity (active and inactive behavior) based on five metrics calculated using variation of movements recorded by the accelerometer. The accuracy of seven predicted behaviors from an independent validation set was 66.7 %, and the accuracy for activity was 87.2 %. In addition to predicted behavior and activity, metrics calculated from accelerometer data and used for random forest predictions were evaluated 7 d before and after lambing and 12 h before and after lambing on six of the 13 ewes where the actual time of lambing was observed. No differences were detected in the seven predicted behaviors either before or after lambing. Four of five accelerometer metrics (P ≤ 0.002) were higher during the 7 d after lambing than the 7 d before lambing. Values for three of the five metrics were highest (P < 0.01) on the day of lambing. All five accelerometer metrics varied during the 12 h pre- and 12 h post parturition (P ≤ 0.004). All accelerometer metrics increased (P ≤ 0.008) 1–2 h before parturition compared to 3–4 h before parturition. In this current study, calculated direct sensor metrics served as a better indicator of lambing than predicted behaviors, processed through complex machine learning algorithms. Commercial use of accelerometers by producers may allow for detection of prolonged labor indicating potential dystocia during parturition, which may reduce lamb mortality and increase production efficiency. These results suggest that real time accelerometers could remotely monitor ewes and potentially provide managers an indication that the dam may lamb soon.
Summary
Identifying the potential for natural soil microbial communities to predictably affect complex plant traits is an important frontier in climate change research. Plant phenology varies with ...environmental and genetic factors, but few studies have examined whether the soil microbiome interacts with plant population differentiation to affect phenology and ecosystem function.
We compared soil microbial variation in a widespread tree species (Populus angustifolia) with different soil inoculum treatments in a common garden environment to test how the soil microbiome affects spring foliar phenology and subsequent biomass growth.
We hypothesized and show that soil bacterial and fungal communities vary with tree conditioning from different populations and elevations, that this soil community variation influences patterns of foliar phenology and plant growth across populations and elevation gradients, and that transferring lower elevation plant genotypes to higher elevation soil communities delayed foliar phenology, thereby shortening the growing season and reducing annual biomass production.
Our findings show the importance of plant–soil interactions that help shape the timing of tree foliar phenology and productivity. These geographic patterns in plant population × microbiome interactions also broaden our understanding of how soil communities impact plant phenotypic variation across key climate change gradients, with consequences for ecosystem functioning.
The current study aimed to understand whether substance-specific parenting practices predicted the probability of child alcohol, cigarette, or marijuana use beyond known family factors like family ...management and parental substance use and norms.
Data were drawn from the Intergenerational Project, which used an accelerated longitudinal design and included 383 families surveyed seven times between 2002 and 2011. Analyses included 224 families with children ages 10–18 years (49% female). Multilevel models tested both concurrent and lagged (predictors at time t − 1, outcomes at time t) associations between child past year use of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana and time-varying measures of substance-specific parenting practices, including permitting child use of alcohol or cigarettes; family rules about alcohol, cigarette, and drug use; and child involvement in family member alcohol or cigarette use (getting, opening, or pouring alcoholic drinks; getting or lighting cigarettes for family members). Demographic controls were included.
Child involvement in family member substance use predicted an increased probability of child substance use both concurrently and 1 year later, even when controlling parent substance use, pro-substance norms, and family management. Family rules about substance use and parent provision of alcohol or cigarettes were not consistently related to child alcohol, cigarette, or marijuana use.
Family-based preventive interventions to reduce youth substance use should continue to focus on family management and include messaging discouraging parents from allowing children to get, open, or pour drinks or get or light cigarettes for family members.
Feeding rodents a high-fat diet (HFD) disrupts normal behavioral rhythms, particularly meal timing. Within the brain, mistimed feeding shifts molecular rhythms in the hippocampus and impairs memory. ...We hypothesize that altered meal timing induced by an HFD leads to cognitive impairment and that restricting HFD access to the “active period” (i.e., night) rescues the normal hippocampal function. In male mice, ad-lib access to an HFD for 20 weeks increased body weight and fat mass, increased daytime meal consumption, reduced hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP), and eliminated day/night differences in spatial working memory. Importantly, two weeks of time-restricted feeding (TRF) at the end of the chronic HFD protocol rescued spatial working memory and restored LTP magnitude, even though there was no change in body composition and total daily caloric intake. These findings suggest that short-term TRF is an effective mechanism for rescuing HFD-induced impaired cognition and hippocampal function.
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•Mice fed a chronic HFD have increased daytime meal consumption and impaired LTP and memory.•HFD-impaired long-term potentiation is rescued by night-time restricted feeding.•Day/night difference in spontaneous alternation is rescued by time-restricted feeding.
Biological sciences; Neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience
Worldwide, Indigenous youth face ongoing challenges and inequalities. Increasing our understanding of life course patterns in Indigenous youth will assist the design of strategies and interventions ...that encourage positive development. This study aimed to increase understanding of resilience and positive development in Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth across Australia and the United States of America. The Australian sample comprised 9680 non-Indigenous and 176 Pacific Islander and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The USA sample comprised 2258 non-Indigenous and 220 Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian and Native American/American Indian peoples. Data were used to examine how Indigenous background, volunteering, and community involvement at average age 15 years (Grade 9) predicted five young adult positive development indicators: Year 12 (Grade 12) school completion, tertiary education participation, independent income, paid employment, and intimate relationship formation from age 18 to 28 years. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that while Indigenous youth showed slower increases in positive young adult development over time, when adjusting for socioeconomic disadvantage, there was a reduction in this difference. Moreover, we found that Grade 9 community involvement and volunteering were positively associated with young adult development for Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth. Findings indicate the importance of addressing structural inequalities and increasing adolescent opportunities as feasible strategies to improve positive outcomes for young Indigenous adults.
1. Contemporary global change, including the widespread mortality of foundation tree species, is altering ecosystems and plant communities at unprecedented rates. Plant-soil interactions drive myriad ...community dynamics, and we hypothesized that such interactions may be an important driver of succession following the loss of foundation tree species. 2. We examined whether plant-soil biota interactions, in the context of a putatively important light gradient associated with foundation tree decline, mediate the expansion of Rhododendron maximum in southeastern US forests where Tsuga canadensis (eastern hemlock), a dominant foundation tree species, is in decline. Using an 11-month, controlled inoculation experiment paired with Illumina sequencing, we tested the following hypotheses: (1) Relative to conspecific (R. maximum-conditioned) soils, R. maximum seedlings have higher performance in soils conditioned by T. canadensis and lower performance in interspace soils (conditioned by neither T. canadensis nor R. maximum) due to variation in soil fungal biota, and (2) seedling performance is greater in high-light vs. low-light environments (matching environments under infested vs. uninfested T. canadensis crowns, respectively). 3. In partial support of the first hypothesis, we found that R. maximum seedling performance was highest in T. conadensis-conditioned and R. maximum-conditioned soils and lowest in interspace soils. Mechanistically, soils conditioned by T. canadensis and R. maximum had more ericoid and ectomycorrhizal fungi, less saprotrophic fungi, and were less species-rich than interspace soils, and variation in these community traits predicted substantial variation in R. maximum seedling biomass. However, in support of our second hypothesis, soil effects on plant performance were evident in high light only; in low light, soil inoculation did not affect plant performance and plants performed worse on average. 4. Synthesis. Our findings suggest that interactions with soil biota act synergistically with altered abiotic environments to mediate species responses to widespread foundation tree mortality, providing evidence for a novel mechanism of plant response to large-scale disturbance. Examining plant-soil interactions in the context of relevant abiotic gradients can, therefore, enhance our understanding, predictions and management of community development processes following forest disturbance.
Species rarity is a common phenomenon across global ecosystems that is becoming increasingly more common under climate change. Although species rarity is often considered to be a stochastic response ...to environmental and ecological constraints, we examined the hypothesis that plant rarity is a consequence of natural selection acting on performance traits that affect a species range size, habitat specificity, and population aggregation; three primary descriptors of rarity. Using a common garden of 25 species of Tasmanian Eucalyptus, we find that the rarest species have 70% lower biomass than common species. Although rare species demonstrate lower biomass, rare species allocated proportionally more biomass aboveground than common species. There is also a negative phylogenetic autocorrelation underlying the biomass of rare and common species, indicating that traits associated with rarity have diverged within subgenera as a result of environmental factors to reach different associated optima. In support of our hypothesis, we found significant positive relationships between species biomass, range size and habitat specificity, but not population aggregation. These results demonstrate repeated convergent evolution of the trait‐based determinants of rarity across the phylogeny in Tasmanian eucalypts. Furthermore, the phylogenetically driven patterns in biomass and biomass allocation seen in rare species may be representative of a larger plant strategy, not yet considered, but offering a mechanism as to how rare species continue to persist despite inherent constraints of small, specialized ranges and populations. These results suggest that if rarity can evolve and is related to plant traits such as biomass, rather than a random outcome of environmental constraints, we may need to revise conservation efforts in these and other rare species to reconsider the abiotic and biotic factors that underlie the distributions of rare plant species.
Although species rarity is often considered to be a stochastic response to environmental and ecological constraints, we examined the hypothesis that plant rarity is a consequence of natural selection acting on performance traits that affect a species range size, habitat specificity, and population aggregation; three primary descriptors of rarity. Using a common garden of 25 species of Tasmanian Eucalyptus, we find a negative phylogenetic autocorrelation underlying the significantly lower biomass of rare versus common species, indicating that traits associated with rarity have diverged within subgenera as a result of environmental factors to reach different associated optima. These results demonstrate repeated convergent evolution of the trait‐based determinants of rarity across the phylogeny in Tasmanian eucalypts and suggest that we may need to revise conservation efforts to reconsider the abiotic and biotic factors that underlie the distributions of rare plant species.
The liver plays a central role that influences cardiovascular disease outcomes through regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism. It is recognized that the local liver molecular clock regulates some ...liver-derived metabolites. However, it is unknown whether the liver clock may impact cardiovascular function. Perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT) is a specialized type of adipose tissue surrounding blood vessels. Importantly, cross talk between the endothelium and PVAT via vasoactive factors is critical for vascular function. Therefore, we designed studies to test the hypothesis that cardiovascular function, including PVAT function, is impaired in mice with liver-specific circadian clock disruption.
is a core circadian clock gene, thus studies were undertaken in male hepatocyte-specific
knockout (HBK) mice and littermate controls (i.e., flox mice). HBK mice showed significantly elevated plasma levels of β-hydroxybutyrate, nonesterified fatty acids/free fatty acids, triglycerides, and insulin-like growth factor 1 compared with flox mice. Thoracic aorta PVAT in HBK mice had increased mRNA expression of several key regulatory and metabolic genes,
,
,
,
, and
, suggesting altered PVAT energy metabolism and thermogenesis. Sensitivity to acetylcholine-induced vasorelaxation was significantly decreased in the aortae of HBK mice with PVAT attached compared with aortae of HBK mice with PVAT removed, however, aortic vasorelaxation in flox mice showed no differences with or without attached PVAT. HBK mice had a significantly lower systolic blood pressure during the inactive period of the day. These new findings establish a novel role of the liver circadian clock in regulating PVAT metabolic gene expression and PVAT-mediated aortic vascular function.
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