A Review and Comparison of U.S. State Wildlife Action Plans for Stonefly (Insecta, Plecoptera) Species of Greatest Conservation Need

State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) were created in order to identify Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) and develop plans to prevent their populations from further decline and the possibility of being listed as threatened or endangered. Which SGCNs are included are decided based on characteristics that determine their vulnerability. As of early 2021, approximately 720stoneflies (Insecta, Plecoptera) species are found in the U.S., but only 143 are listed as SGCN. Only 29 states have stoneflies included on their SGCN lists, but 37 states use EPT (Ephemeroptera + Plecoptera + Trichoptera) metrics when assessing water quality issues in running water habitats. In future revisions of SWAPs, Plecoptera systematists and specialists should be consulted for more accurate information regarding at risk species. Existing conservation lists, such as those provided by the Natural Heritage Network (i.e., NatureServe), should also be consulted. Species that are endemic to specific areas should also be considered as they are not present anywhere else in the world. Overall, insects and other invertebrates tend to be left out of conservation efforts because of the lack of research and the lack of interest in protecting them. Their importance is often overlooked, and this continues to discourage additional research and conservation for these species

MOVEMENT BEHAVIOR AND METAPOPULATION CONNECTIVITY OF STREAM SALAMANDERS IN RESPONSE TO DISTURBANCE EVENTS

Metapopulations are shaped by the dispersal between populations in a landscape. Disturbance events can disrupt this connectivity resulting in local population extinction. For my dissertation, I used a combination of empirical and theoretical techniques to examine dispersal in response to disturbance and assessed it’s population-level consequences. My research used capture-mark-recapture sampling techniques to evaluate stream salamander movement in response to (1) a supraseasonal drought and (2) mountaintop-removal-mining (MTR) and valley-filling (VF) and (3) agent-based simulation modeling to evaluate population extinction risk in response to varying dispersal and mortality rates. First, I evaluated the effects of a supraseasonal drought, a severe drought that occurs outside of predictable seasonal dry periods for an extended period of time, on the movement frequency distribution, survival, and growth rates of adult Desmognathus fuscus. I found that salamanders were more likely to move immediately after the supraseasonal drought compared to before or during the drought. Salamanders who moved experienced slightly higher growth rates post-drought. Although movement frequency was low during the drought, survival was higher for individuals who moved in comparison to individuals who remained in their original capture location. My results suggest that adult salamanders were potentially displaying an adaptive movement strategy to resist drought conditions by moving away from affected (i.e., dry) areas within the study stream during the drought and moving towards replenished resources in other areas after the drought ended. Next, I evaluated movement pathways (e.g. within-stream, overland), movement frequency distribution curves, individual body condition, and dispersal rates for two common stream salamander species (D. fuscus and D. monticola) within a reclaimed MTR and VF landscape and compared these populations with populations from an undisturbed, reference landscape. I found that stream salamanders utilized within-stream dispersal pathways in the reference and MTR and VF landscape. However, overland movement was only detected in the reference landscape, not in the MTR and VF landscape. Body condition was a potential driver for individuals engaging in dispersal and was overall lower for individuals in the MTR and VF landscape compared to the reference landscape. My results indicated that overland connectivity between salamander populations in the MTR and VF landscape was disrupted compared to the undisturbed landscape and resulted in population isolation, which, if left unchanged, could result in local population extirpation. Finally, I constructed two agent-based models with different metapopulation structures and investigated how differences in extinction risk was affected by differences in dispersal and mortality probabilities between populations and between areas. I found that differences in dispersal and mortality did influence population extinction risk. My models demonstrated that increased dispersal into a population decreased it’s extinction risk but only when population differences in mortality was low. In addition, when mortality was higher for an area, populations located on the fringe of the metapopulation network had a higher extinction risk compared to the populations that bordered other populations. My results indicated that maintaining connectivity between populations lowers population extinction risk, especially in areas of lower habitat quality resulting from a disturbance event. This research demonstrates that long-distance movement allows populations to resist the negative effects of environmental and anthropogenic disturbance. Therefore, maintaining and, when applicable, restoring both aquatic and terrestrial habitat is likely vital for stream salamander population persistence

Exploring Disclosure Research in Nursing Communication and Scholarship: Current Research and Future Directions

Health care in the U.S. is a dynamic and demanding field faced with many challenges such as an aging population, coupled with increases in chronic diseases and conditions (e.g., heart disease, stroke, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and arthritis). Addressing these challenges involves ongoing communication among numerous constituents comprised of health care providers (physicians, nurses, therapists), health administrators, patients, family members, and/or other caregivers. Part of managing a chronic illness, for example, is coordinating information surrounding the condition such as disclosing health information to others. The purpose of this article is twofold: First, we examine current “disclosure” research (referred to variously as sharing, information management, avoidance, holding back, withdrawal, and privacy management) in both nursing and communication scholarship. Second, we propose an agenda for expanding disclosure research in nursing contexts and for more collaborative research among nursing, communication, and other relevant disciplines (e.g., psychology, social or health psychology, medicine, and public health)

Nurses Involvement in Nursing Home Culture Change: Overcoming Barriers, Advancing Opportunities

Summarizes discussions from a 2008 interdisciplinary panel convened to identify facilitators and barriers to nurses' involvement in culture change in nursing homes and actions to promote nurse competencies in resident-directed care. Makes recommendations

Meeting Success: Understanding Effective Negotiations on Global Environmental Problems

Kellie Greene ’23, Majors: Political Science and History, Minor: Black Studies Kathryn Mahon ’23, Majors: Political Science and Mathematics Faculty Mentor: Dr. Casey Stevens, Political Science What makes a meeting successful? What makes a meeting successful on a pressing international environmental problem? This project involved separate coding of the effectiveness of key negotiation meetings in international environmental politics to attempt and identify the features that make successful negotiations possible and likely. The presentation will discuss various features that were identified by the students working through official negotiation reports from the 1990s until today

A Theory-Grounded Measure of Adolescents\u27 Response to Media Literacy Interventions

Media literacy interventions offer relatively new and promising avenues for the prevention of risky health behaviors among children and adolescents, but current literature remains largely equivocal about their efficacy. We propose that (a) much of this ambiguity stems from the lack of conceptual clarity in the literature regarding the cognitive process through which media literacy interventions influence their target audience, and (b) that the ability to track this cognitive process by means of valid and reliable measures is necessary to evaluating the effects of media literacy programs on their audience. Accordingly, the primary objective of this study was to develop and test theoretically-grounded measures of audiences’ degree of engagement with the content of media literacy programs based on the recognition that engagement (and not participation per se) can better explain and predict individual variations in the effects of these programs. We tested the validity and reliability of this measure with two different samples of 10th grade high school students (Study I N = 294; Study II N = 171) who participated in a pilot and actual test of a brief media literacy curriculum. Responses to an inventory of items measuring evaluation of the media literacy program underwent an exploratory factor analysis for Study I. Four message evaluation factors (involvement, perceived novelty, critical thinking, personal reflection) emerged and were confirmed through CFA (Study II), demonstrating acceptable reliability as scales as well as item-level convergent validity and convergent and discriminant validity with other measures. We discuss the implications of including process of effect measures in the design and evaluation of media literacy interventions

Comparing marine survival among Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout in the Salish Sea

Recent work on marine survival in Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout has shown a decline in marine survival in the Salish Sea that was not evident in other regions. For Chinook, the decline was not explained well by oceanographic patterns, and for coho, regional-scale patterns were suggested as important in understanding survival. Recent work on the development of indicators of Puget Sound steelhead survival has shown that predator abundance and patterns in hatchery releases, as well as oceanographic conditions are informative in predicting marine survival. While the three species of focus for the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project have different life-histories, and are therefore subjected to variable pressures at multiple scales, this current analysis aims to answer three questions: 1.) Are there similarities in survival trends among the three species? 2.) Do regional patterns in survival emerge when survival trends are evaluated concurrently across the three species? 3.) Does release strategy (yearling or subyearling) confer a survival advantage, and if so, is this consistent across all species? To evaluate survival time series, we used multivariate time series analysis with multiple groupings (species, spatial, and release strategy) to identify commonalities among species. Observed commonalities will aid in the development of indicators of marine survival for coho and Chinook by focusing efforts on appropriate spatial or temporal attributes. A hypothesis-driven approach similar to that employed for the development of indicators for steelhead survival will be used to relate coho and Chinook to environmental, biological, and anthropogenic factors influencing survival

New Associations between Drug-Induced Adverse Events in Animal Models and Humans Reveal Novel Candidate Safety Targets.

To improve our ability to extrapolate preclinical toxicity to humans, there is a need to understand and quantify the concordance of adverse events (AEs) between animal models and clinical studies. In the present work, we discovered 3011 statistically significant associations between preclinical and clinical AEs caused by drugs reported in the PharmaPendium database of which 2952 were new associations between toxicities encoded by different Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities terms across species. To find plausible and testable candidate off-target drug activities for the derived associations, we investigated the genetic overlap between the genes linked to both a preclinical and a clinical AE and the protein targets found to interact with one or more drugs causing both AEs. We discuss three associations from the analysis in more detail for which novel candidate off-target drug activities could be identified, namely, the association of preclinical mutagenicity readouts with clinical teratospermia and ovarian failure, the association of preclinical reflexes abnormal with clinical poor-quality sleep, and the association of preclinical psychomotor hyperactivity with clinical drug withdrawal syndrome. Our analysis successfully identified a total of 77% of known safety targets currently tested in in vitro screening panels plus an additional 431 genes which were proposed for investigation as future safety targets for different clinical toxicities. This work provides new translational toxicity relationships beyond AE term-matching, the results of which can be used for risk profiling of future new chemical entities for clinical studies and for the development of future in vitro safety panels.This work was supported as part of the PhD project of K.A.G funded by the European Research Council and AstraZeneca Early Oncology TD

Reconstructing historical patterns of primary production in Puget Sound using growth increment data from shells of long-lived geoducks (Panopea generosa)

Bottom-up hypotheses predict that changes in primary production affect marine survival of species like Pacific salmon. Long term records of primary production would provide important data to test these predictions. However, direct observations of primary production (in situ fluorometers, water chemistry, and satellite observations of color back-scatter) have relatively short time series (\u3c 30 years). We investigated whether growth increments of geoduck clams (Panopea generosa) are correlated with primary production in different sub-basins of greater Puget Sound. Geoduck are long-lived (older specimens live \u3e100 years), widely distributed throughout the Salish Sea, and deposit annual growth rings in their shells. Shell samples from aged geoducks were by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in four sub-basins within greater Puget Sound (Strait of Jan de Fuca, Southern Strait of Georgia, South Puget Sound, and Central Basin). Geoduck shells from Saratoga passage were provided by the Tulalip Tribe. Using growth indices, the known correlation of growth indices with sea surface temperature and other long-term measurements, and existing basin-level records of temperature and primary production, we modeled historical patterns of primary production in different regions of greater Puget Sound. Analyses show that the relationship between geoduck growth, temperature, and primary production varies between sub-basins, and stable isotope analysis suggests that geoducks may be more than just primary consumers. These issues make reconstruction of a historical record of primary production from growth increments challenging. Nevertheless, analyses suggest that residual growth (after accounting for temperature variation) can explain variation in annual marine survival of local coho and chinook salmon stocks. This indicates the method has promise for retrospective hypothesis testing

Growing a Sustainable Portland Metropolitan Foodshed

Project Description and Objectives: Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) provided funding for this study to examine key agricultural trends, identify producer needs and define strategies to strengthen the local food production system. The goals of the study are to: Define the Portland Metropolitan Foodshed; identify related agricultural and economic trends and develop a needs assessment based on input from producers and other stakeholders; assemble a regional toolkit of strategies to support evolution of a sustainable Portland Metropolitan Foodshed; work with the City of Damascus, Oregon to test the toolkit on a local level; Develop a research and educational program that supports these goals and supports small and medium farmers in the region. This project differs from many other studies of the barriers and opportunities faced by farmers because it focuses specifically on farms that are trying to survive within a growing metropolitan region. While these farms face significant challenges related to urban growth, they also have significant opportunities as urban consumers begin to demand food that is grown locally and sustainability and food related experiences that can supplement farm income