Private land manager capacity to conserve threatened communities under climate change.

Major global changes in vegetation community distributions and ecosystem processes are expected as a result of climate change. In agricultural regions with a predominance of private land, biodiversity outcomes will depend on the adaptive capacity of individual land managers, as well as their willingness to engage with conservation programs and actions. Understanding adaptive capacity of landholders is critical for assessing future prospects for biodiversity conservation in privately owned agricultural landscapes globally, given projected climate change. This paper is the first to develop and apply a set of statistical methods (correlation and bionomial regression analyses) for combining social data on land manager adaptive capacity and factors associated with conservation program participation with biophysical data describing the current and projected-future distribution of climate suitable for vegetation communities. We apply these methods to the Tasmanian Midlands region of Tasmania, Australia and discuss the implications of the modelled results on conservation program strategy design in other contexts. We find that the integrated results can be used by environmental management organisations to design community engagement programs, and to tailor their messages to land managers with different capacity types and information behaviours. We encourage environmental agencies to target high capacity land managers by diffusing climate change and grassland management information through well respected conservation NGOs and farm system groups, and engage low capacity land managers via formalized mentoring programs.

Characterizing spatial uncertainty when integrating social data in conservation planning.

Recent conservation planning studies have presented approaches for integrating spatially referenced social (SRS) data with a view to improving the feasibility of conservation action. We reviewed the growing conservation literature on SRS data, focusing on elicited or stated preferences derived through social survey methods such as choice experiments and public participation geographic information systems. Elicited SRS data includes the spatial distribution of willingness to sell, willingness to pay, willingness to act, and assessments of social and cultural values. We developed a typology for assessing elicited SRS data uncertainty which describes how social survey uncertainty propagates when projected spatially and the importance of accounting for spatial uncertainty such as scale effects and data quality. These uncertainties will propagate when elicited SRS data is integrated with biophysical data for conservation planning and may have important consequences for assessing the feasibility of conservation actions. To explore this issue further, we conducted a systematic review of the elicited SRS data literature. We found that social survey uncertainty was commonly tested for, but that these uncertainties were ignored when projected spatially. Based on these results we developed a framework which will help researchers and practitioners estimate social survey uncertainty and use these quantitative estimates to systematically address uncertainty within an analysis. This is important when using SRS data in conservation applications because decisions need to be made irrespective of data quality and well characterized uncertainty can be incorporated into decision theoretic approaches.

Nosocomial Staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome caused by intra-articular injection.

BACKGROUND: The pathogenic role of nasal carriage as a source for cutaneous and soft-tissue Staphylococcus aureus (SA) infections, and Staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome (SSSS) in particular, is unclear. OBSERVATION: We herein describe a nosocomial outbreak of SSSS in three orthopaedic patients who received intra-articular injections by a single orthopaedic surgeon. Bacteriological samples from the index patients and medical personnel involved in their care were assessed by phage typing, polymerase chain reaction for exfoliative toxin genes, SmaI macro-restriction analysis and molecular spa-typing. These studies first revealed SA cultural growth in synovial fluid of all three patients as well as nasal mucosa of one medical assistant. Moreover, all SA isolates had the same phage typing and antibiotic susceptibilities and were positive for exfoliative toxin ETa by polymerase chain reaction. SmaI macro-restriction and spa-typing further confirmed all proband isolates to be identical. CONCLUSION: These findings provide evidence that SA nasal colonization of otherwise healthy carriers is a risk factor for SA infections, including SSSS, in predisposed individuals.