What is coastal climate?

Historical definitions of what determines whether one lives in a coastal area or not have varied over time. According to Culliton (1998), a “coastal county” is defined as a county with at least 15% of its total land area located within a nation’s coastal watershed. This emphasizes the land areas within which water flows into the ocean or Great Lakes, but may be better suited for ecosystems or water quality research (Crowell et al. 2007). Some Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) documents suggest that “coastal” includes shoreline-adjacent coastal counties, and perhaps even counties impacted by flooding from coastal storms. An accurate definition of “coastal” is critical in this regard since FEMA uses such definitions to revise and modernize their Flood Insurance Rate Maps (Crowell et al. 2007). A recent map published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coastal Services Center for the Coastal Change Analysis Program shows that the “coastal” boundary covers the entire state of New York and Michigan, while nearly all of South Carolina is considered “coastal.” The definition of “coastal” one chooses can have major implications, including a simple count of coastal population and the influence of local or state coastal policies. There is, however, one aspect of defining what is “coastal” that has often been overlooked; using atmospheric long-term climate variables to define the inland extent of the coastal zone. This definition, which incorporates temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and relative humidity, is furthermore scalable and globally applicable - even in the face of shifting shorelines. A robust definition using common climate variables should condense the large broad definition often associated with “coastal” such that completely landlocked locations would no longer be considered “coastal.” Moreover, the resulting definition, “coastal climate” or “climatology of the coast”, will help coastal resource managers make better-informed decisions on a wide range of climatologically-influenced issues. The following sections outline the methodology employed to derive some new maps of coastal boundaries in the United States. (PDF contains 3 pages

Nutrition Diet & Health

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, UK. in 1986. Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd., Worcester. Text by Michael J. Gibney, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition, Trinity College, Dublin. 168p. ill. 21cm.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irckbooks/1099/thumbnail.jp

Why Publishing Open Access

The benefits of Open Access publishing will be explained in this talk. The presenters will clarify the difference between Gold and Green OA, discuss funder requirements, and highlight our institutional repository. De-mystifying Open Access Benefits Funders requirement Gold vs. Green OA OA journals Open Data Institutional Repositor

Why Publishing Open Access

The benefits of Open Access publishing will be explained in this talk. The presenters will clarify the difference between Gold and Green OA, discuss funder requirements, and highlight our institutional repository. De-mystifying Open Access Benefits Funders requirement Gold vs. Green OA OA journals Open Data Institutional Repositor

Scaling-up an evidence-based intervention for osteoarthritis in real-world settings : a pragmatic evaluation using the RE-AIM framework

Scaling-up and sustaining effective healthcare interventions is essential for improving healthcare; however, relatively little is known about these processes. In addition to quantitative experimental designs, we need approaches that use embedded, observational studies on practice-led, naturally occurring scale-up processes. There are also tensions between having adequately rigorous systems to monitor and evaluate scale-up well that are proportionate and pragmatic in practice. The study investigated the scale-up of an evidence-based complex intervention for knee and hip osteoarthritis (ESCAPE-pain) within 'real-world' settings by England's 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs). A pragmatic evaluation of the scale-up of ESCAPE-pain using the RE-AIM framework to measure Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance. The evaluation used routine monitoring data collected from April 2014 to December 2018 as part of a national scale-up programme. Between 2014 and 2018, ESCAPE-pain was adopted by over 110 clinical and non-clinical sites reaching over 9000 people with osteoarthritis. The programme showed sustained clinical effectiveness (pain, function and quality of life) and high levels of adherence (78.5% completing 75% of the programme) within a range of real-world settings. Seven hundred seventy people (physiotherapists and exercise professionals) have been trained to deliver ESCAPE-pain, and 84.1% of sites have continued to deliver the programme post-implementation. ESCAPE-pain successfully moved from being an efficacious "research intervention" into an effective intervention within 'real-world' clinical and non-clinical community settings. However, scale-up has been a gradual process requiring on-going, dedicated resources over 5 years by a national network of Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs). Whilst the collection of monitoring and evaluation data is critical in understanding implementation and scale-up, there remain significant challenges in developing systems sufficiently rigorous, proportionate and locally acceptable

Diet, lifestyle and body weight in Irish children: findings from Irish Universities Nutrition Alliance national surveys

Childhood obesity is an issue of public health concern globally. This review reports on levels of overweight and obesity in Irish children and examines some aspects of their diet and lifestyle proposed to promote or protect against increasing body fatness in children. While there is still some debate with regard to the most appropriate cut-off points to use when assessing body fatness in children, approximately one in five Irish children (aged 2–17 years) have been classified as overweight (including obese) according to two generally accepted approaches. Furthermore, comparison with previous data has shown an increase in mean body weight and BMI over time. On examining dietary patterns for Irish children, there was a noticeable transition from a less energy dense diet in pre-school children to a more energy dense diet in older children and teenagers, associated with a change to less favourable dietary intakes for fibre, fat, fruit and vegetables, confectionery and snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages as children got older. A significant proportion of school-aged children and teenagers reported watching more than 2 h television per day (35 % on school-days and 65 % on week-ends) compared with 13 % of pre-school children. For children aged 5–12 years, eating out of the home contributed just 9 % of energy intake but food eaten from outside the home was shown to contribute a higher proportion of energy from fat and to be less fibre-dense than food prepared at home. Improvements in dietary lifestyle are needed to control increasing levels of overweight and obesity in children in Ireland

Dietary vitamin D2 - a potentially underestimated contributor to vitamin D nutritional status of adults?

It has been suggested that vitamin D2 is not very prevalent in the human food chain. However, data from a number of recent intervention studies suggest that the majority of subjects had measurable serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D2 (25(OH)D2) concentrations. Serum 25(OH)D2, unlike 25(OH)D3, is not directly influenced by exposure of skin to sun and thus has dietary origins; however, quantifying dietary vitamin D2 is difficult due to the limitations of food composition data. Therefore, the present study aimed to characterise serum 25(OH)D2 concentrations in the participants of the National Adult Nutrition Survey (NANS) in Ireland, and to use these serum concentrations to estimate the intake of vitamin D2 using a mathematical modelling approach. Serum 25(OH)D2 concentration was measured by a liquid chromatography–tandem MS method, and information on diet as well as subject characteristics was obtained from the NANS. Of these participants, 78·7 % (n 884) had serum 25(OH)D2 concentrations above the limit of quantification, and the mean, maximum, 10th, 50th (median) and 90th percentile values of serum 25(OH)D2 concentrations were 3·69, 27·6, 1·71, 2·96 and 6·36 nmol/l, respectively. To approximate the intake of vitamin D2 from these serum 25(OH)D2 concentrations, we used recently published data on the relationship between vitamin D intake and the responses of serum 25(OH)D concentrations. The projected 5th to 95th percentile intakes of vitamin D2 for adults were in the range of 0·9–1·2 and 5–6 μg/d, respectively, and the median intake ranged from 1·7 to 2·3 μg/d. In conclusion, the present data demonstrate that 25(OH)D2 concentrations are present in the sera of adults from this nationally representative sample. Vitamin D2 may have an impact on nutritional adequacy at a population level and thus warrants further investigation