25 research outputs found
Urban community gardeners' knowledge and perceptions of soil contaminant risks
Although urban community gardening can offer health, social, environmental, and economic benefits, these benefits must be weighed against the potential health risks stemming from exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals and organic chemicals that may be present in urban soils. Individuals who garden at or eat food grown in contaminated urban garden sites may be at risk of exposure to such contaminants. Gardeners may be unaware of these risks and how to manage them. We used a mixed quantitative/qualitative research approach to characterize urban community gardeners' knowledge and perceptions of risks related to soil contaminant exposure. We conducted surveys with 70 gardeners from 15 community gardens in Baltimore, Maryland, and semi-structured interviews with 18 key informants knowledgeable about community gardening and soil contamination in Baltimore. We identified a range of factors, challenges, and needs related to Baltimore community gardeners' perceptions of risk related to soil contamination, including low levels of concern and inconsistent levels of knowledge about heavy metal and organic chemical contaminants, barriers to investigating a garden site's history and conducting soil tests, limited knowledge of best practices for reducing exposure, and a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent and manage soil contamination. Key informants discussed various strategies for developing and disseminating educational materials to gardeners. For some challenges, such as barriers to conducting site history and soil tests, some informants recommended city-wide interventions that bypass the need for gardener knowledge altogether
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An open science resource for establishing reliability and reproducibility in functional connectomics
Efforts to identify meaningful functional imaging-based biomarkers are limited by the ability to reliably characterize inter-individual differences in human brain function. Although a growing number of connectomics-based measures are reported to have moderate to high test-retest reliability, the variability in data acquisition, experimental designs, and analytic methods precludes the ability to generalize results. The Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) is working to address this challenge and establish test-retest reliability as a minimum standard for methods development in functional connectomics. Specifically, CoRR has aggregated 1,629 typical individuals’ resting state fMRI (rfMRI) data (5,093 rfMRI scans) from 18 international sites, and is openly sharing them via the International Data-sharing Neuroimaging Initiative (INDI). To allow researchers to generate various estimates of reliability and reproducibility, a variety of data acquisition procedures and experimental designs are included. Similarly, to enable users to assess the impact of commonly encountered artifacts (for example, motion) on characterizations of inter-individual variation, datasets of varying quality are included
Open-ended responses to “As a community gardener, do you have any concerns about hazards to your health?”
<p>Open-ended responses to “As a community gardener, do you have any concerns about hazards to your health?”</p
Open-ended responses to “Where do you get information on gardening practices?”
<p>Open-ended responses to “Where do you get information on gardening practices?”</p
Community gardeners' information needs related to soil contamination, as reported by key informants.
<p>Community gardeners' information needs related to soil contamination, as reported by key informants.</p
Open-ended responses to questions about soil contaminant knowledge: “What soil contaminants are you aware of that urban gardeners should be concerned about in general?” and “As a community gardener, do you have any concerns about hazards to your health?”
<p>Open-ended responses to questions about soil contaminant knowledge: “What soil contaminants are you aware of that urban gardeners should be concerned about in general?” and “As a community gardener, do you have any concerns about hazards to your health?”</p