On the acceptance of urban beavers in Martinez, California

As ecosystem engineers, beavers construct complex riparian and wetland habitats that benefit many other species, including endangered salmonids. Through their landscape alterations, beavers also promote increased groundwater recharge and provide refugia during wildfires and high flow events by impounding water and allowing it to spread across the landscape. Prior to the North American colonial fur trapping campaigns, there were between 60 and 400 million beavers in North America. By the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were extirpated from many parts of the continent, however through human efforts, their population has since rebounded to between 10 and 15 million. The loss of beavers has significantly affected the arid west, including California where beavers had played an important role by impounding water on the surface and water on the landscape. Human tolerance of beaver behavior has been found to be one of the biggest barriers to increasing the number of beavers in California. Starting in the early 20th century, if beavers caused a disruption in human dominated areas in California, the most common action was to deprecate the animal in order to prevent potential flooding or vegetation damage. However, in the past 40 years, there has been increasing interest in coexistence alternatives where humans mitigate potential damages through various methods, allowing beavers and humans to coexist. To better understand how social factors affect the decision to coexist with beavers, I conducted a case study of a high-profile event culminating in beaver coexistence which took place from November 2007 through April 2008 in Martinez, California. This was one of the first cases in recent California history where an urban community chose to coexist with beavers rather than remove them. I reviewed documents, transcribed recordings of city council meetings, and conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with individuals who could provide insights relevant to the Martinez events, including an understanding of the factors that contributed to the community’s decision to coexist with beavers and the legacy of the Martinez decision. I thematically coded these materials for recurrent patterns and themes. Key findings included: (1) the local history and experiences of those that lived in the area contributed to a sense of place which influenced Martinez’s decision to coexist with beavers; (2) the urban location and associated easy accessibility of the beavers and dam helped foster a relationship with the beavers; and (3) coexistence is more likely to occur when people can experience wildlife through non-conflict-oriented interactions before conflicts arise

Failure of a patient-centered intervention to substantially increase the identification and referral for-treatment of ambulatory emergency department patients with occult psychiatric conditions: a randomized trial [ISRCTN61514736]

BACKGROUND: We previously demonstrated that a computerized psychiatric screening interview (the PRIME-MD) can be used in the Emergency Department (ED) waiting room to identify patients with mental illness. In that trial, however, informing the ED physician of the PRIME-MD results did not increase the frequency of psychiatric diagnosis, consultation or referral. We conducted this study to determine whether telling the patient and physician the PRIME-MD result would result in the majority of PRIME-MD-diagnosed patients being directed toward treatment for their mental illness. METHODS: In this single-site RCT, consenting patients with non-specific somatic chief complaints (e.g., fatigue, back pain, etc.) completed the computerized PRIME-MD in the waiting room and were randomly assigned to one of three groups: patient and physician told PRIME-MD results, patient told PRIME-MD results, and neither told PRIME-MD results. The main outcome measure was the percentage of patients with a PRIME-MD diagnosis who received a psychiatric consultation or referral from the ED. RESULTS: 183 (5% of all ED patients) were approached. 123 eligible patients consented to participate, completed the PRIME-MD and were randomized. 95 patients had outcomes recorded. 51 (54%) had a PRIME-MD diagnosis and 8 (16%) of them were given a psychiatric consultation or referral in the ED. While the frequency of consultation or referral increased as the intervention's intensity increased (tell neither = 11% (1/9), tell patient 15% (3/20), tell patient and physician 18% (4/22)), no group came close to the 50% threshold we sought. For this reason, we stopped the trial after an interim analysis. CONCLUSION: Patients willingly completed the PRIME-MD and 54% had a PRIME-MD diagnosis. Unfortunately, at our institution, informing the patient (and physician) of the PRIME-MD results infrequently led to the patient being directed toward care for their psychiatric condition

Mutant phenotypes for thousands of bacterial genes of unknown function.

One-third of all protein-coding genes from bacterial genomes cannot be annotated with a function. Here, to investigate the functions of these genes, we present genome-wide mutant fitness data from 32 diverse bacteria across dozens of growth conditions. We identified mutant phenotypes for 11,779 protein-coding genes that had not been annotated with a specific function. Many genes could be associated with a specific condition because the gene affected fitness only in that condition, or with another gene in the same bacterium because they had similar mutant phenotypes. Of the poorly annotated genes, 2,316 had associations that have high confidence because they are conserved in other bacteria. By combining these conserved associations with comparative genomics, we identified putative DNA repair proteins; in addition, we propose specific functions for poorly annotated enzymes and transporters and for uncharacterized protein families. Our study demonstrates the scalability of microbial genetics and its utility for improving gene annotations