From Living to Fish to Fishing to Live: The Evolution of Personal Leisure

Abstract This study investigated the impact of guiding anglers for compensation on a guide’s attitude toward fishing as a personally satisfying recreational activity. Additionally, we sought to develop and employ a specialization typology based on style of fishing participation to understand how current attitudes towards fishing as a personal leisure activity vary among different groups of fishing guides. Eighteen semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with Texas inshore fishing guides and subsequent analysis yielded a typology representing four distinct styles of participation. These guides can be placed on a continuum from least specialized to most specialized: 1) Limit Guides, 2) All-purpose Guides, 3) Lure Guides and 4) Sight-casting Guides. Guides exhibiting less specialized styles of participation were more likely to view guiding as “work” or a “job”, less likely to participate in fishing as a personal leisure activity, and less likely to experience personal angling enjoyment vicariously through their clients’ fishing experience

Recreational Activity and Place Meaning

Abstract Although past research has documented the association between the types of activities an individual undertakes in a particular setting and the intensity of attachment that they hold for that place, little work has investigated the connection between activity type and place meaning. This lack of empirical evidence is most likely due to the fact that most place meaning studies have sought to describe the thoughts and feelings individuals ascribe to a place rather than to understand the relationships involved in meaning formation. Using data collected from a survey of recreational visitors to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, this investigation attempted to identify the connections between individuals’ type of activity participation and the meanings they ascribed to the setting in which they recreated. Results indicated that, after controlling for visitation frequency, the importance of certain meanings to the individual does vary between activity types

Place Bonding and Trust: The Case of Feral Hog Management Surrounding Big Thicket National Preserve

The management of feral hogs surrounding the Big Thicket National Preserve (BTNP) in Texas calls for managers and stakeholders to work together to manage resource issues. Research has indicated that place bonding can be a common ground upon which managers and stakeholders develop trust in one another to form a basis for collaborative management. However, such research has not examined the different types of trust (e.g., trust in local managers and trust in an entire agency) that exist. This investigation compared several models of trust and then sought to identify the relationship between place bonding and trust. Data were collected through a mail survey of residents living near the BTNP. The results suggested that a conceptualization of trust wherein an individual’s institutional trust in an agency contributes to their social trust in agency managers explained the most variance. The analysis also confirmed a place bonding—trust relationship

Radiomics-Based Outcome Prediction for Pancreatic Cancer Following Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy

(1) Background: Radiomics use high-throughput mining of medical imaging data to extract unique information and predict tumor behavior. Currently available clinical prediction models poorly predict treatment outcomes in pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Therefore, we used radiomic features of primary pancreatic tumors to develop outcome prediction models and compared them to traditional clinical models. (2) Methods: We extracted and analyzed radiomic data from pre-radiation contrast-enhanced CTs of 74 pancreatic cancer patients undergoing stereotactic body radiotherapy. A panel of over 800 radiomic features was screened to create overall survival and local-regional recurrence prediction models, which were compared to clinical prediction models and models combining radiomic and clinical information. (3) Results: A 6-feature radiomic signature was identified that achieved better overall survival prediction performance than the clinical model (mean concordance index: 0.66 vs. 0.54 on resampled cross-validation test sets), and the combined model improved the performance slightly further to 0.68. Similarly, a 7-feature radiomic signature better predicted recurrence than the clinical model (mean AUC of 0.78 vs. 0.66). (4) Conclusion: Overall survival and recurrence can be better predicted with models based on radiomic features than with those based on clinical features for pancreatic cancer

Public Response to Park and Recreation Funding and Cost-saving Strategies: The Role of Organizational Trust and Committment

Historically, public park and recreation services have been funded through general funds and appropriations, with minimal amounts derived from non-tax revenue sources. The fiscal conservative movement, however, has spawned an expansion of nontax revenues and cost saving strategies. Th is study examines the level of citizen support for a variety of funding and cost-saving strategies for park and recreation agencies in a metropolitan region, and the factors related to citizens’ opinions about such strategies. Data were collected through a mail survey of adult residents of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania region. A total of 578 questionnaires were completed. Results showed that funding strategies involving external contributions such as donations and corporate sponsorships were most strongly supported by the local citizenry. Respondents were least supportive of park services privatization and the use of park entrance fees. Regression analysis was used to test the relationships between citizen socio-demographic characteristics, park use patterns, organizational trust and commitment, and level of support for the various strategies. Organizational trust, commitment, and citizen characteristics were signifi cantly related to a number of funding strategies. While prior research has examined the role of trust and commitment in the implementation of enterprise funding strategies (e.g. user fees), our data indicates that trust and commitment were more salient for general tax support than for other, more transactional funding strategies, such as user fees and corporate sponsorships. Respondents who perceived that their local park agencies were socially competent and who were more committed to the agency were also more likely to support taxes and less likely to support park privatization. These results affirm that a trusting and committed citizenry is a key ingredient in preventing the erosion of tax-based support and the subsequent privatization of park and recreation services. Park and recreation administrators who wish to expand their funding beyond existing tax support should take actions to foster trust and commitment across their multiple constituent groups. Agencies that currently enjoy a high level of constituent trust and commitment should be cautious when privatizing park services, lest they compromise existing levels of trust and commitment

Parasites of domestic and wild animals in South Africa. LI. Ticks infesting leopard tortoises Stigmochelys pardalis, hingeback tortoises Kinixys zombensis and angulate tortoises Chersina angulata

All authors read and approved the manuscript. A.P. collected ticks from leopard tortoises and from angulate tortoises and ascertained the sites of attachment of ticks on angulate tortoises. K.J.L. collected ticks from hingeback tortoises, and I.G.H. identified all the ticks and compiled the first draft of the manuscript.The objective of the study was to record the tick species collected from three species of tortoise, each in a different province of South Africa. Ticks were collected from leopard tortoises, Stigmochyles pardalis, in the southern region of the Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga province; from hingeback tortoises, Kinixys zombensis, in the Enseleni Nature Reserve, KwaZulu-Natal province and from angulate tortoises, Chersina angulata, in the West Coast National Park, Western Cape province. Of the 63 leopard tortoises examined, 58 were infested with Amblyomma marmoreum and 49 with Amblyomma hebraeum, and all stages of development of both species were recovered. Amblyomma nuttalli was collected from 25 hingeback tortoises, and all stages of development were present. All 24 angulate tortoises examined were infested with Amblyomma sylvaticum, and large numbers of larvae, nymphs and adults were collected. Three snake species and a sand lizard were also infested with A. sylvaticum. The adults of A. marmoreum, A. nuttalli and A. sylvaticum were identified as specific parasites of the family Testudinidae, whereas all stages of development of A. hebraeum were classified as generalists.The participation of the senior author in the project was partially funded by a grant from the National Research Foundation.http://www.ojvr.orgam2017Veterinary Tropical Disease