Montana’s Bat Acoustic Surveillance Efforts: Pre-White-Nose Syndrome (Oral Presentation and Poster)

Montana’s bat species face a wide array of conservation issues that threaten the long-term viability of these populations. The potential arrival of White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) may be the single greatest threat as mortality has exceeded 95% for some bat populations in eastern North America. A collaborative effort was initiated in 2011 to document year-round spatial and temporal activity patterns of Montana’s bats prior to WNS arrival. In the last 4 years, we have deployed a network of over 60 Song Meter ultrasonic acoustic detector/recorder stations programmed to record bat passes from sunset to sunrise year-round. Through late December of 2014, these recording stations have resulted in more than 3.9 million full spectrum sound files containing more than 12.5 terabytes of information. Processing and automated analyses have been completed for all sound files and over 30,000 bat passes have been reviewed by hand using an updated Montana bat call characteristics key to definitively confirm the presence of species during each month of the year, identify the lowest temperatures at which individual bat species are active, and track overall bat activity, regardless of species, at each station. Highlights to-date include: 1421 new records of monthly species presence throughout the state, numerous first records of species’ activity during the fall, winter, and spring months, numerous first records of species in regions with previously limited bat survey effort, documentation of nightly activity patterns throughout the year and regular winter activity for a few resident species, and the year-round presence of species previously considered migratory

Montana’s Bat Acoustic Surveillance Efforts: an Update (Poster)

Montana’s bat species face a wide array of conservation issues that threaten their long-term viability.  A collaborative effort was initiated in 2011 to document year-round activity patterns of Montana’s bats prior to the arrival of White-nose Syndrome as mortality has exceeded 95% for some bat populations effected by this disease in eastern North America.  In the last 5 years, we have deployed a network of over 76 Song Meter ultrasonic acoustic detector/recorder stations programmed to record bat passes from sunset to sunrise year-round. Through late December 2015, these recording stations have resulted in more than 7.2 million full spectrum sound files containing nearly 13 terabytes of information. Processing and automated analyses have been completed for all sound files and over 43,000 bat passes have been reviewed by hand using an updated Montana bat call characteristics key to definitively confirm the presence of species during each month of the year, identify the lowest temperatures at which individual bat species are active, and track overall bat activity, regardless of species, at each station. Highlights to-date include: 2,104 new records of monthly species presence in various landscapes across the region, numerous first records of species’ activity during the fall, winter, and spring months, numerous first records of species in regions with previously limited survey effort, documentation of nightly activity patterns throughout the year, regular winter activity for a few resident species, the year-round presence of species previously considered migratory, and exciting patterns of activity relative to temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, and moonlight

Montana’s Bat Acoustic Surveillance Efforts: Pre-White-Nose Syndrome (Oral Presentation and Poster)

Montana’s bat species face a wide array of conservation issues that threaten the long-term viability of these populations. The potential arrival of White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) may be the single greatest threat as mortality has exceeded 95% for some bat populations in eastern North America. A collaborative effort was initiated in 2011 to document year-round spatial and temporal activity patterns of Montana’s bats prior to WNS arrival. In the last 4 years, we have deployed a network of over 60 Song Meter ultrasonic acoustic detector/recorder stations programmed to record bat passes from sunset to sunrise year-round. Through late December of 2014, these recording stations have resulted in more than 3.9 million full spectrum sound files containing more than 12.5 terabytes of information. Processing and automated analyses have been completed for all sound files and over 30,000 bat passes have been reviewed by hand using an updated Montana bat call characteristics key to definitively confirm the presence of species during each month of the year, identify the lowest temperatures at which individual bat species are active, and track overall bat activity, regardless of species, at each station. Highlights to-date include: 1421 new records of monthly species presence throughout the state, numerous first records of species’ activity during the fall, winter, and spring months, numerous first records of species in regions with previously limited bat survey effort, documentation of nightly activity patterns throughout the year and regular winter activity for a few resident species, and the year-round presence of species previously considered migratory

Banner News

https://openspace.dmacc.edu/banner_news/1283/thumbnail.jp

Oakland Cemetery Comfort Station Buildings

This Historic Structure Report attempts to define the historical context and physical condition of the women\u27s and men\u27s comfort stations at Oakland Cemetery. The comfort stations were constructed in 1908, fifty-eight years after the opening of Oakland, in order to provide adequate public restroom facilities for the large crowds who visited the cemetery during its early history. A group effort has been made to research and document the history of the two comfort buildings, assess their current status, and make recommendations for treatment.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_heritagepreservation/1053/thumbnail.jp

Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent

A Comparison of Cooling Techniques to Treat Cardiac Arrest Patients with Hypothermia

Introduction. We sought to compare the performance of endovascular cooling to conventional surface cooling after cardiac arrest. Methods. Patients in coma following cardiopulmonary resuscitation were cooled with an endovascular cooling catheter or with ice bags and cold-water-circulating cooling blankets to a target temperature of 32.0–34.0°C for 24 hours. Performance of cooling techniques was compared by (1) number of hourly recordings in target temperature range, (2) time elapsed from the written order to initiate cooling and target temperature, and (3) adverse events during the first week. Results. Median time in target temperature range was 19 hours (interquartile range (IQR), 16–20) in the endovascular group versus. 10 hours (IQR, 7–15) in the surface group (P = .001). Median time to target temperature was 4 (IQR, 2.8–6.2) and 4.5 (IQR, 3–6.5) hours, respectively (P = .67). Adverse events were similar. Conclusion. Endovascular cooling maintains target temperatures better than conventional surface cooling

Life\u27s Essential 8: Optimizing Health in Older Adults

The population worldwide is getting older as a result of advances in public health, medicine, and technology. Older individuals are living longer with a higher prevalence of subclinical and clinical cardiovascular disease (CVD). In 2010, the American Heart Association introduced a list of key prevention targets, known as Life\u27s Simple 7 to increase CVD-free survival, longevity, and quality of life. In 2022, sleep health was added to expand the recommendations to Life\u27s Essential 8 (eat better, be more active, stop smoking, get adequate sleep, manage weight, manage cholesterol, manage blood pressure, and manage diabetes). These prevention targets are intended to apply regardless of chronologic age. During this same time, the understanding of aging biology and goals of care for older adults further enhanced the relevance of prevention across the range of functions. From a biological perspective, aging is a complex cellular process characterized by genomic instability, telomere attrition, loss of proteostasis, inflammation, deregulated nutrient-sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication. These aging hallmarks are triggered by and enhanced by traditional CVD risk factors leading to geriatric syndromes (eg, frailty, sarcopenia, functional limitation, and cognitive impairment) which complicate efforts toward prevention. Therefore, we review Life\u27s Essential 8 through the lens of aging biology, geroscience, and geriatric precepts to guide clinicians taking care of older adults

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

Empirically derived parameterizations of the direct aerosol radiative effect based on ORACLES aircraft observations

In this paper, we use observations from the NASA ORACLES (ObseRvations of CLouds above Aerosols and their intEractionS) aircraft campaign to develop a framework by way of two parameterizations that establishes regionally representative relationships between aerosol-cloud properties and their radiative effects. These relationships rely on new spectral aerosol property retrievals of the single scattering albedo (SSA) and asymmetry parameter (ASY). The retrievals capture the natural variability of the study region as sampled, and both were found to be fairly narrowly constrained (SSA: 0.83&thinsp;&plusmn;&thinsp;0.03 in the mid-visible, 532&thinsp;nm; ASY: 0.54&thinsp;&plusmn;&thinsp;0.06 at 532&thinsp;nm). The spectral retrievals are well suited for calculating the direct aerosol radiative effect (DARE) since SSA and ASY are tied directly to the irradiance measured in the presence of aerosols &ndash; one of the inputs to the spectral DARE. The framework allows for entire campaigns to be generalized into a set of parameterizations. For a range of solar zenith angles, it links the broadband DARE to the mid-visible aerosol optical depth (AOD) and the albedo (&alpha;) of the underlying scene (either clouds or clear sky) by way of the first parameterization: P(AOD, &alpha;). For ORACLES, the majority of the case-to-case variability of the broadband DARE is attributable to the dependence on the two driving parameters of P(AOD, &alpha;). A second, extended, parameterization PX(AOD, &alpha;, SSA) explains even more of the case-to-case variability by introducing the mid-visible SSA as a third parameter. These parameterizations establish a direct link from two or three mid-visible (narrowband) parameters to the broadband DARE, implicitly accounting for the underlying spectral dependencies of its drivers. They circumvent some of the assumptions when calculating DARE from satellite products or in a modeling context. For example, the DARE dependence on aerosol microphysical properties is not explicit in P or PX because the asymmetry parameter varies too little from case to case to translate into appreciable DARE variability. While these particular DARE parameterizations only represent the ORACLES data, they raise the prospect of generalizing the framework to other regions. </div