Local Ecological Learning: Creating Place-based Knowledge through Collaborative Wildlife Research on Private Lands.

Wildlife across all land tenures is under threat from anthropogenic drivers including climate change, invasive species, and habitat loss. This study focuses on private lands, where effective management for wildlife conservation requires locally relevant knowledge about wildlife populations, habitat condition, threatening ecological processes, and social drivers of and barriers to conservation. Collaborative socio-ecological research can inform wildlife management by integrating the place-based ecological and social knowledge of private landholders with the theoretical and applied knowledge of researchers and practitioners, including that of Traditional Owners. In privately-owned landscapes, landholders are often overlooked as a source of local ecological knowledge grounded in learning through continuous embodied interaction with their environment and community. Here we report on WildTracker, a transdisciplinary socio-ecological research collaboration involving 160 landholders in Tasmania, Australia. This wildlife-focused citizen science project generated and integrated local socio-ecological knowledge in the research process. The project gathered quantitative and qualitative data on wildlife ecology, land management practices, and landholder learning via wildlife cameras, sound recorders, workshops, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Through this on-going collaboration, landholders, researchers, and conservation practitioners established relationships based on mutual learning, gathering and sharing knowledge, and insights about wildlife conservation. Our project documents how local ecological knowledge develops and changes through everyday processes of enquiry and interaction with other knowledge holders including researchers and conservation practitioners. Qualitative insights derived from the direct experience and citizen science practices of landholders were integrated with quantitative scientific assessments of wildlife populations and habitat condition to produce a novel model of collaborative conservation research.

Autofluorescence-Raman Spectroscopy for Ex Vivo Mapping Colorectal Liver Metastases and Liver Tissue.

INTRODUCTION: Identifying colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) during liver resection could assist in achieving clear surgical margins, which is an important prognostic variable for both disease-free and overall survival. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of auto-fluorescence (AF) and Raman spectroscopy for ex vivo label-free discrimination of CRLMs from normal liver tissue. Secondary aims include exploring options for multimodal AF-Raman integration with respect to diagnosis accuracy and imaging speed on human liver tissue and CRLM. METHODS: Liver samples were obtained from patients undergoing liver surgery for CRLM who provided informed consent (15 patients were recruited). AF and Raman spectroscopy was performed on CRLM and normal liver tissue samples and then compared to histology. RESULTS: AF emission spectra demonstrated that the 671 nm and 775/785 nm excitation wavelengths provided the highest contrast, as normal liver tissue elicited on average around eight-fold higher AF intensity compared to CRLM. The use of the 785 nm wavelength had the advantage of enabling Raman spectroscopy measurements from CRLM regions, allowing discrimination of CRLM from regions of normal liver tissue eliciting unusual low AF intensity, preventing misclassification. Proof-of-concept experiments using small pieces of CRLM samples covered by large normal liver tissue demonstrated the feasibility of a dual-modality AF-Raman for detection of positive margins within few minutes. CONCLUSIONS: AF imaging and Raman spectroscopy can discriminate CRLM from normal liver tissue in an ex vivo setting. These results suggest the potential for developing integrated multimodal AF-Raman imaging techniques for intraoperative assessment of surgical margins.

Pseudoactinomyces in cervical mucus.

Actinomyces israelii are gram-positive filamentous bacteria forming yellow sulfur granules. They are the most well known complication of intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUCD). Healthcare staff dealing with reporting cervical smears should be aware of pseudoactinomyces entity in a cervical smears and biopsies as it may raise a false alarm to the clinician and may lead to unnecessary removal of IUCD and/or medical treatment.

External beam radiotherapy for severe epistaxis from Osler-Weber-Rendu disease.

Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) is a genetic disorder of blood vessels, which affects about 1 in 10,000 people. The disorder is also sometimes referred to as Osler-Weber-Rendu Disease after the doctors who studied HHT. The disorder affects males and females from all racial and ethnic groups, and the most commonly affected organs are the nose, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and brain--in that order. Radiation therapy should be considered for intractable bleeding from the upper airway or alimentary tract.

A suite of twelve single nucleotide polymorphism markers for detecting introgression between cutthroat and rainbow trout.

A suite of 12 subspecies and species-specific single nucleotide polymorphism (species-specific SNP) markers was developed to distinguish rainbow trout (RT) Oncorhynchus mykiss from the four major subspecies of cutthroat trout: westslope cutthroat trout (WCT) Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi, Yellowstone cutthroat trout (YCT) Oncorhynchus clarki bouvieri, coastal cutthroat trout (CCT) Oncorhynchus clarki clarki, Lahontan cutthroat trout (LCT) Oncorhynchus clarki henshawi, and their hybrids. Several of the markers were linked to help strengthen hybrid determinations, and sex-specific species-specific SNP assays were also developed.