Forest Views: Shifting Attitudes Toward the Environment in Northeast Oregon

This brief reports on a telephone survey conducted in fall 2014 as part of the ongoing Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) project. CAFOR focuses on seven counties in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon (Baker, Crook, Grant, Umatilla, Union, Wallowa, and Wheeler), where the landscape and local livelihoods are changing in interconnected ways. In an effort to inform policy development around natural resource management, the study seeks to understand how public perceptions of climate change and forest management intersect. Authors Angela Boag, Joel Hartter, Lawrence Hamilton, Forrest Stevens, Mark Ducey, Michael Palace, Nils Christoffersen, and Paul Oester report that 65 percent of those surveyed believe that forests are less healthy than they were twenty years ago. Approximately half of residents support increased user fees to improve forest health on federal land, and a majority believes that climate change is happening, although opinion is split between those who believe it is human-caused and those who believe it is caused by natural forces. The authors conclude that innovative economic and policy solutions are needed across the Inland West to help people and forests regain a strong and productive relationship that both supports livelihoods and sustains working landscapes

Does it matter if people think climate change is human caused?

There is a growing consensus that climate is changing, but beliefs about the causal factors vary widely among the general public. Current research shows that such causal beliefs are strongly influenced by cultural, political, and identity-driven views. We examined the influence that local perceptions have on the acceptance of basic facts about climate change. We also examined the connection to wildfire by local people. Two recent telephone surveys found that 37% (in 2011) and 46% (in 2014) of eastern Oregon (USA) respondents accept the scientific consensus that human activities are now changing the climate. Although most do not agree with that consensus, large majorities (85–86%) do agree that climate is changing, whether by natural or human causes. Acceptance of anthropogenic climate change generally divides along political party lines, but acceptance of climate change more generally, and concerns about wildfire, transcend political divisions. Support for active forest management to reduce wildfire risks is strong in this region, and restoration treatments could be critical to the resilience of both communities and ecosystems. Although these immediate steps involve adaptations to a changing climate, they can be motivated without necessarily invoking human-caused climate change, a divisive concept among local landowners

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Characterizing non-industrial private forest landowners\u27 forest management engagement and advice sources.

Non-industrial private forestland (NIPF) owners have options for engagement by following management strategies that reduce wildfire risk on their forestlands. Forest management engagement is a broad term with underlying categories and management implications. To better understand these categories, we examine interview data on the engagement of forest landowners from a case study of private forestland owner perspectives in northeast Oregon, USA. NIPF landowners outline two types of forest management engagement, one for property and one for community-focused forestland management. NIPF owners describe actions for engagement in public forestland management and how these actions differ from engagement in private management. Additionally, NIPF owners establish barriers to engagement in both public and private forestland management. Our findings can be used to better identify unengaged private forestland owners in the U.S. West, informing the design and implementation of extension and outreach for NIPF owners

Climate change beliefs and forest management in eastern Oregon: implications for individual adaptive capacity

The management decisions of private landowners affect forest structure and composition, and may impact the resilience of forested regions. In this case study we assessed barriers to both intentional and incidental climate-adaptive forest management among nonindustrial private forest owners in eastern Oregon, USA. In this context, incidental adaptations result from synergies between climate-adaptive forest management and actions motivated by goals such as wildfire mitigation, which landowners may prioritize regardless of concerns about climate change. Through semistructured interviews we used qualitative analyses to identify barriers to adaptation, including subjective (cognitive and experiential) and structural barriers (social, political, and economic) by comparing individual cases. Overall, we found that intentional climate change adaptation had low salience among participants, though a large majority of forest owners were active managers motivated by other goals, contributing to widespread incidental adaptation. We found that nonindustrial private forest owners who engaged in or considered intentional climate adaptation actions generally believed that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. Many respondents perceived local environmental change, notably reduced snowpack, but this was not associated with adaptive actions or intentions. The few participants who considered or implemented intentional climate adaptation actions generally had written forest management plans containing both forest inventories and specific management goals. Improving access to resources for forest management planning may enhance fire- and climate-smart forest management by facilitating scenario visioning and formalizing intentions. Although climate change beliefs were subjective barriers to intentional climate adaptation, many of the same structural barriers limited intentional and incidental adaptation. Place-based education, reliable funding mechanisms, and cooperative approaches among landowners may enhance adaptive capacity and promote the resilience of these nonindustrial private forestlands

Finding common ground: agreement on increasing wildfire risk crosses political lines

Wildfire is a growing threat in the western US, driven by high fuel loads, a warming climate, and rising human activity in the wildland urban interface. Diverse stakeholders must collaborate to mitigate risk and adapt to changing conditions. Communication strategies in collaborative efforts may be most effective if they align with local perspectives on wildfire and climate change. We investigate drivers of residents’ subjective perceptions regarding both issues in eastern Oregon using 2018 survey data, and examine objective evidence regarding local fuel loads, climate, and wildfire to identify trends and contextualize residents’ perceptions. We find that sociopolitical identity strongly predicts climate change beliefs, and that identity and climate beliefs predict both perceptions of recent past climate and likely future trends. Political influences on climate perceptions are strongest among people whose friends mostly belong to the same party. In contrast, perceptions about future wildfire risks are largely independent of climate-change beliefs, and of individual or peer-group politics. Most people accurately perceive the rising frequency of large wildfires, and expect this trend to continue. Decision makers have an opportunity to engage diverse stakeholders in developing policies to mitigate increasing wildfire risk without invoking climate change, which remains politically polarizing in some communities

Forest Views Shifting Attitudes Toward the Environment in Northeast Oregon

Residents of northeast Oregon were surveyed by telephone in an effort to assess individual perceptions of forests and natural resource management. Results show that residents are generally well informed about declining forest health, and they identify active forest management as a high priority. Just over half of residents support increasing public land use fees to pay for forest restoration activities, while only a minority support raising local taxes. Thus, creative policy solutions are likely needed to address the forest restoration funding gap. Residents were nearly unanimous in their belief that natural resources can be preserved for future generations and at the same time used to create jobs.Compared to a similar survey in 2011, a larger proportion of participants in 2014 prioritize renewable energy development over drilling and exploration for oil, an increasing percentage believe that environmental rules limiting development have been good for their communities, and fewer support the elimination of wolves. These shifts in public opinion appear to be due to changes in perceptions among longtime residents, rather than demographic changes, and suggest that communities may be more receptive to regulations and programs that address ecological restoration and stewardship goals, as well as climate change impacts

Uveitis in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis : 18-Year Outcome in the Population-based Nordic Cohort Study

Purpose: To assess the long-term outcome of uveitis in juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Design: Population-based, multicenter, prospective JIA cohort, with a cross-sectional assessment of JIA-associated uveitis (JIA-U) 18 years after the onset of JIA. Participants: A total of 434 patients with JIA, of whom 96 had uveitis, from defined geographic areas of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Methods: Patients with onset of JIA between January 1997 and June 2000 were prospectively followed for 18 years. Pediatric rheumatologists and ophthalmologists collected clinical and laboratory data. Main Outcome Measures: Cumulative incidence of uveitis and clinical characteristics, JIA and uveitis disease activity, ocular complications, visual outcome, and risk factors associated with the development of uveitis-related complications. Results: Uveitis developed in 96 (22.1%) of 434 patients with JIA. In 12 patients (2.8%), uveitis was diagnosed between 8 and 18 years of follow-up. Systemic immunosuppressive medication was more common among patients with uveitis (47/96 [49.0%]) compared with patients without uveitis (78/338 [23.1 %]). Active uveitis was present in 19 of 78 patients (24.4%) at the 18-year visit. Ocular complications occurred in 31 of 80 patients (38.8%). Short duration between the onset of JIA and the diagnosis of uveitis was a risk factor for developing ocular complications (odds ratio [OR], 1.4; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.1-1.8). Patients with a diagnosis of uveitis before the onset of JIA all developed cataract and had an OR for development of glaucoma of 31.5 (95% CI, 3.6-274). Presence of antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) was also a risk factor for developing 1 or more ocular complications (OR, 3.0; 95% CI, 1.2-7.7). Decreased visual acuity (VA) <6/12 was found in 12 of 135 eyes (8.9%) with uveitis, and 4 of 80 patients (5.0%) with JIA-U had binocular decreased VA <6/12. Conclusions: Our results suggest that uveitis screening should start immediately when the diagnosis of JIA is suspected or confirmed and be continued for more than 8 years after the diagnosis of JIA. Timely systemic immunosuppressive treatment in patients with a high risk of developing ocular complications must be considered early in the disease course to gain rapid control of ocular inflammation