Oil and Gas Impacts on Wyoming’s Sagegrouse: Summarizing the Past and Predicting the Foreseeable Future

Historical impacts from oil and gas development to greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) habitat are well-documented in some areas of Wyoming, in particular within natural gas development fields, such as the Powder River Basin and JonahPinedale. The drilling techniques and pad densities in these fields have been extrapolated to estimate future oil and gas impacts in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2010) warranted-but-precluded listing determination for the sage-grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Further, assumptions regarding the scale of oil and gas development are incorporated within various resource management plan amendments by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) throughout the range of the sage-grouse. We evaluated the status of Wyoming sage-grouse leks by quantifying the scale of oil and gas impacts across the state of Wyoming and the extent that sage-grouse persistence is impacted by oil and gas development using the impact analysis lens of well-pad density within a 3.2-km radius of a lek (Doherty et al. 2010). The analysis provides that 75% (1,770 out of 2,356 leks analyzed) of identified leks (active and inactive) have(Doherty et al. 2010). As to future development of oil and gas in Wyoming, 64% of Wyoming leks (1,508 leks) are protected from oil and gas development densities of \u3e12 wells per 32.2-km2 , due to prescriptive density and disturbance restrictions within the Wyoming Core Area Policy. The Wyoming Core Area Policy protects priority sage-grouse habitats by limiting surface disturbance to an average of 5%. Specific to oil and gas development, a prescriptive density standard allows an average of 1 well pad per square mile. Thus, the combination of core area protections with the technological shift to directional and horizontal drilling that is being deployed in both existing and new fields to recover hydrocarbons (i.e., technologies that dramatically reduce the fragmentation and disturbance profiles of oil and gas development), suggests that threat projections in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2010) listing decision on sage-grouse due to future oil and gas development have been overstated

Ischemic conditioning-induced endogenous brain protection: Applications pre-, per- or post-stroke

In the area of brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases, a plethora of experimental and clinical evidence strongly indicates the promise of therapeutically exploiting the endogenous adaptive system at various levels like triggers, mediators and the end-effectors to stimulate and mobilize intrinsic protective capacities against brain injuries. It is believed that ischemic pre- or post-conditioning are actually the strongest known interventions to stimulate the innate neuroprotective mechanism to prevent or reverse neurodegenerative diseases including stoke and traumatic brain injury. Recently, studies showed the effectiveness of ischemic per-conditioning in some organs. Therefore the term ischemic conditioning, including all interventions applied pre-, per- and post- ischemia, which spans therapeutic windows in 3 time periods, has recently been broadly accepted by scientific communities. In addition, it is extensively acknowledged that ischemia-mediated protection not only affects the neurons but also all the components of the neurovascular network (consisting of neurons, glial cells, vascular endothelial cells, pericytes, smooth muscle cells, and venule/veins). The concept of cerebroprotection has been widely used in place of neuroprotection. Intensive studies on the cellular signaling pathways involved in ischemic conditioning have improved the mechanistic understanding of tolerance to cerebral ischemia. This has added impetus to exploration for potential pharmacologic mimetics, which could possibly induce and maximize inherent protective capacities. However, most of these studies were performed in rodents, and the efficacy of these mimetics remains to be evaluated in human patients. Several classical signaling pathways involving apoptosis, inflammation, or oxidation have been elaborated in the past decades. Newly characterized mechanisms are emerging with the advances in biotechnology and conceptual renewal. In this review we are going to focus on those recently reported methodological and mechanistic discoveries in the realm of ischemic conditioning. Due to the varied time differences of ischemic conditioning in different animal models and clinical trials, it is important to define optimal timing to achieve the best conditioning induced neuroprotection. This brings not only an opportunity in treatment of stroke, but challenges as well, as data is just becoming available and the procedures are not yet optimized. The purpose of this review is to shed light on exploiting these ischemic conditioning modalities to protect the cerebrovascular system against diverse injuries and neurodegenerative disorders