Pet Project or Best Project? Online Decision Support Tools for Prioritizing Barrier Removals in the Great Lakes and Beyond

Structures that block movement of fish through river networks are built to serve a variety of societal needs, including transportation, hydroelectric power, and exclusion of exotic species. Due to their abundance, road crossings and dams reduce the amount of habitat available to fish that migrate from the sea or lakes into rivers to breed. The benefits to fish of removing any particular barrier depends on its location within the river network, its passability to fish, and the relative position of other barriers within the network. Balancing the trade-offs between ecological and societal values makes choosing among potential removal projects difficult. To facilitate prioritization of barrier removals, we developed an online decision support tool (DST) with three functions: (1) view existing barriers at various spatial scales; (2) modify information about barriers, including removal costs; and (3) run optimization models to identify portfolios of removals that provide the greatest amount of habitat access for a given budget. A survey of available DSTs addressing barrier removal prioritization indicates that barrier visualization is becoming widespread but few tools allow dynamic calculation of connectivity metrics, scenario analysis, or optimization. Having these additional functions, our DST enables organizations to develop barrier removal priorities based on cost-effectiveness in restoring aquatic connectivity

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio