Could “Choosing Wisely” help fight health worker burnout?

Managers should involve clinicians in efforts to cut back on unneeded or unproven tasks, team says

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MICHIGAN MEDICINE - UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

As hospitals, clinics and health systems seek to overcome the wave of burnout and departures among their clinical staff, they might want to adopt an approach that they’ve used over the past decade in clinical care: choosing wisely.

That’s the recommendation of a team of University of Michigan and Dartmouth College experts who call for managers overseeing health care staff to focus more on asking clinicians to spend their time on the tasks that are most needed, and reduce unnecessary or unproven work that contributes to burnout.

Writing in JAMA Health Forum, the team calls for the adoption of the same approach that the Choosing Wisely campaign has used for the past 10 years.

That campaign, founded by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation and embraced by medical professional societies representing many different specialties, has armed clinicians and patients with rules of thumb about which screenings, tests, scans and treatments they can safely avoid ordering for their patients due to lack of evidence that they make a difference.

When it comes to the health care workforce, they write in a new Viewpoint, the same principles could apply to administrative management practices:

• Crowdsource: Ask clinicians to share which aspects of their electronic health record system, clinical management protocols and required administrative or training tasks eat up time without providing value.
• Evaluate: Where possible, check the evidence behind different practices and what might happen if some of them are stopped.
• Prioritize: Reduce the burden on clinicians by stopping, modifying
• Work for change: If “time sucking” tasks are required by regulations, health care organizations can elevate concerns to those in a position to evaluate and potentially modify the requirements. And types of care that lack evidence for their efficacy either way could be ripe for research studies to develop evidence that could guide decisions.

“Choosing Wisely has had an incredible impact on the way we practice medicine,” says Eve Kerr, M.D., M.P.H., the lead author of the new piece, chief of the Division of General Medicine at Michigan Medicine and researcher who has studied the Choosing Wisely movement. “If we can apply these same principles to the way we manage the time and duties of our health care professionals, we could potentially improve workforce satisfaction and retention at a time when this is a critical issue for our nation.”

Kerr and her colleagues cite the National Academy of Medicine’s new National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being and the American Medicine Association’s new Saving Time Playbook as sources of specific ideas for reducing unnecessary burdens on clinicians and enhancing their well-being.

The Michigan Program on Value Enhancement, a joint effort of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation and Michigan Medicine, is a good example of how researchers and clinicians can collaborate to drive change, says Kerr, who helped launch MPrOVE several years ago. The program now has a wide range of projects under way to bring evidence to our approaches for enhancing the value of clinical care, approaches that could be easily applied to improving the value of clinical work.

The other authors of the piece are Christopher Friese, Ph.D., R.N., AOCN, of the U-M School of Nursing and Joanne Conroy, M.D. of Dartmouth Health and Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine.

Enhancing the Value of Clinical Work—Choosing Wisely to Preserve the Clinician Workforce JAMAHealthForum.2022;3(11):e224018.doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.4018

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JOURNAL

JAMA Health Forum

DOI

10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.4018 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Enhancing the Value of Clinical Work—Choosing Wisely to Preserve the Clinician Workforce

Psychological First Aid training could help improve care workers’ wellbeing

A new study has shown that Psychological First Aid, training originally created for people to support others, can help healthcare workers in care homes improve their own mental wellbeing.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY

A new study has shown that Psychological First Aid, training originally created for people to support others, can help healthcare workers in care homes improve their own mental wellbeing.

First developed by the World Health Organisation, Psychological First Aid (PFA) is the globally recommended training for people, such as healthcare workers, who support others during emergencies.

It offers guidance on delivering psychosocial care in the immediate aftermath of an emergency event.

Although PFA training was originally created for people to support others, scientists from Northumbria University and the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) have now also identified it as a suitable way of helping care workers look after their own mental health and wellbeing.

As part of the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2020 the UK government introduced free to access online PFA training in an effort to support frontline staff, such the 1.8 million people working in care homes across the country.

Evaluating the effectiveness of this initiative, academics at Northumbria and UHI investigated the uptake of PFA training among healthcare workers in UK care homes and assessed its effects on their wellbeing.

Funded by the Royal College of Nursing Foundation, the study was the first of its kind and makes recommendations regarding further implementation of Psychological First Aid.

The researchers found that while the uptake of PFA training was low among healthcare workers - less than 10% of study participants had done the training - those who had undertaken PFA coped better.

The results suggest that PFA training helped in overcoming stress and coping via self-growth and improving relationships with others, but there was a concern around accessibility, which academics say could possibly explain the low uptake of training.

Some research participants described that it helped them cope better when thinking of giving up their job and promoted resilience, with one person commenting: “(PFA) has helped me cope better, it was a position I was thinking of giving up at one time and now I have the strength to carry on.”

Others described how it helped support them in their experiences of bereavement to overcome the trauma of the pandemic: “I found it (PFA) useful as it helped me cope with bereavement as well as the experience of seeing relatives affected by COVID-19.” Another participant went as far as to say that PFA training “should be made compulsory for all staff especially in nursing and care homes during the pandemic or not.”

Dr Mariyana Schoultz, the project lead and Associate Professor in Mental Health in Northumbria’s Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, said: “Findings suggest that PFA training has the potential to: strengthen resilience for staff in health and social care; promote anti-stigma messages and normalise help seeking behaviour; PFA holds the potential to minimise the risk of developing more serious psychological problems such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But we need more research in this area.

“We therefore recommend that consideration be given to funding an integrated programme of research and development to further develop, implement, and evaluate a co-produced iteration of PFA for use in the UK care home sector and beyond.”

Deepa Korea, Director of the RCN Foundation, said “Staff working in social care during the pandemic faced significant pressures which inevitably had an impact on their own mental health and emotional wellbeing. That’s why I am delighted that the RCN Foundation was able to commission this important study which adds to the body of evidence about the practical ways in which we can support health and social care staff.”

The study, ‘Uptake and Effects of Psychological First Aid Training For Healthcare Workers’ Wellbeing in Nursing Homes: A UK National Survey’ has been published in scientific journal PLOS One.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0277062 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

‘Uptake and Effects of Psychological First Aid Training For Healthcare Workers’ Wellbeing in Nursing Homes: A UK National Survey’

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Nov-2022

SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks in care homes for the elderly and disabled in Germany

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DEUTSCHES AERZTEBLATT INTERNATIONAL

The introduction of COVID-19 vaccination and additional pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical measures helped to notably reduce the extent and severity of SARS-CoV-19 outbreaks in care homes for elderly and disabled people in Germany. This is the result of a recent study reported by Dunja Said, Beneditta Suwono, and co-authors in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International. The authors investigated in their comparative epidemiological analysis of the time periods before and after the start of the vaccination campaign 7794 outbreaks with 177 696 outbreak cases in care homes. 74.6% of the age group was 60 or older. The case-fatality rate among outbreak cases was 14.5%. The size and severity were compared for the following phases of the pandemic: phase 1, the period before vaccinations had been introduced; phase 2: start of the vaccination campaigns; phase 3: the period from which a majority of the residents had been fully initially immunized. From phases 1 to 3, the median number of cases/outbreaks fell from 21 to 8. The case-fatality rate fell from 15.7% to 10.0%.

The researchers recommend that the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical measures implemented in care homes should continue to be used in future, so as to prevents severe disease courses in residents. This comprises in particular a higher rate of complete vaccination, a more stringent implementation of recommendations for vaccine boosters, and the simultaneous adherence to high hygiene standards.

 

Cite this as:

Said D, Suwono B, Schweickert B, Schönfeld V, Eckmanns T, Haller S: SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks in care homes for the elderly and disabled in Germany—a comparative epidemiological analysis of the periods before and after the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Dtsch Arztebl Int 2022; 119. DOI: 10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0170

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JOURNAL

Deutsches Ärzteblatt international

DOI

10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0170 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

SARS-CoV-2 Outbreaks in Care Homes for the Elderly and Disabled in Germany

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Nov-2022

PRISON NATION U$A

Extreme temperatures take deadly toll on people in Texas prisons, study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The U.S. has the world’s largest population of prisoners, and Texas holds more incarcerated people than any other state. As climate change continues to increase the severity, frequency and duration of heat waves, the approximately 160,000 individuals in Texas prisons — as well as the people who work in these settings — come under intense physical duress in prisons without climate controls, according to a new study led by researchers at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, Nov. 2, examined the relationship between heat exposure and mortality risks in Texas prisons, focusing on how these risks vary between prisons with air conditioning and those without it. 

The researchers analyzed data gathered between 2001 and 2019 showing that 271 people died due to extreme heat exposure during that timeframe.

Even a 1 degree increase above 85 degrees Fahrenheit can elevate the daily risk of dying by 0.7%, the researchers found.

The research team — which in addition to Brown also included scholars from Harvard University, Boston University and the organization Texas Prison Community Advocates — combined data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics on mortality in Texas prisons with temperature data from NASA and used a novel epidemiologic analysis to arrive at its findings. The team reported that approximately 13% of mortality during warm months may be attributable to extreme in Texas prison facilities without air conditioning.

It is important to note that while an average of 14 people died each year from heat-related causes in Texas prisons without air conditioning, not a single heat-related death occurred in climate-controlled prisons, said lead study author Julie Skarha, who received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from Brown in June 2022.

“The majority of Texas prisons do not have universal air conditioning,” Skarha said. “And in these settings, we found a 30-fold increase in heat-related mortality when compared to estimates of heat-related mortality in the general U.S. population.”

Study co-author Dr. David Dosa, an associate professor of medicine, and health services, policy and practice at Brown, pointed out that heat is often a silent killer.

“We have seen similar situations in nursing homes, where heat isn’t reported on the death certificate,” said Dosa, a practicing geriatrician with dual appointments at the Providence V.A. Medical Center and Rhode Island Hospital. “It’s only after we run these analyses that we can determine how much of a role heat played in someone’s death.”

The findings, the researchers said, suggest that an air conditioning policy for Texas prisons may be an important part of protecting the health of people living and working in these facilities.

Other study authors included Dr. Josiah Rich and David Savitz from Brown, Amite Dominick from Texas Prison Community Advocates, Keith Spangler from Boston University and Antonella Zanobetti from Harvard. The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.39849 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Provision of Air Conditioning and Heat-Related Mortality in Texas Prisons

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

COI STATEMENT

Dr Zanobetti reported receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study and outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.

nTIDE October 2022 Jobs Report: Strong labor market for people with disabilities – here to stay?

National Trends in Disability Employment (nTIDE) – Issued semi-monthly by Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire

Reports and Proceedings

KESSLER FOUNDATION

 

IMAGE: THIS GRAPHIC COMPARES THE LABOR MARKET INDICATORS FOR SEPTEMBER 2022 AND OCTOBER 2022 SHOWING INCREASES IN THE EMPLOYMENT-TO-POPULATION RATIO AND LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES, WHILE THESE INDICATORS REMAINED FLAT FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT DISABILITIES. view more 

CREDIT: KESSLER FOUNDATION

East Hanover, NJ – November 4, 2022 – Employment remains at historic highs for people with disabilities, but whether these gains will persist is a topic of today’s National Trends in Disability Employment – Monthly Update (nTIDE), issued by Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability (UNH-IOD). The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a marked increase in flexible business practices that benefit workers with disabilities, and a new survey indicates that many of these changes are likely to be here to stay.

Month-to-Month nTIDE Numbers (comparing September 2022 to October 2022)

Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Jobs Report released today, the employment-to-population ratio for people with disabilities (ages 16-64) increased from 34.9 percent in September to 35.5 percent in October (up 1.7 percent or 0.6 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the employment-to-population ratio remained the same at 74.6 percent in September and October. The employment-to-population ratio, a key indicator, reflects the percentage of people who are working relative to the total population (the number of people working divided by the number of people in the total population multiplied by 100).

“The employment-to-population ratio for people with disabilities not only increased but remains steadily above historic highs. This contrasts with the lag we have seen for their counterparts without disabilities, whose ratio is just reaching its pre-pandemic levels,” said John O’Neill, PhD, director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at Kessler Foundation. “Efforts to combat inflation continue, however, with this week’s major rate hike the latest in a series by the Federal Reserve,” he cautioned. “While these moves may dampen the future labor market, there are other positive factors for people with disabilities who are striving to work.”

Findings were similar for October’s labor force participation rate. For people with disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate increased from 38.0 percent in September to 38.7 percent in October (up 1.8 percent or 0.7 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate remained the same, 77.1 percent in September and October. The labor force participation rate is the percentage of the population that is working, not working, and on temporary layoff, or not working and actively looking for work.

“The employment gains we’re seeing among people with disabilities are very encouraging,” remarked Andrew Houtenville, PhD, professor of economics and the research director of the UNH-IOD. “These may lead to long-term improvements in the workplace integration of people with disabilities,” explained Dr. Houtenville. “From our latest employment and disability survey, we’ve seen that supervisors indicate these positive changes are here to stay.”

Read more about the 2022 National Employment & Disability Survey: Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic Supervisor Perspectives. This new survey compares the workplaces of 2017 and 2022, revealing gains in recruiting, hiring, accommodating, and retaining employees with disabilities

Year-to-Year nTIDE Numbers (Comparing October 2021 to October 2022)

The employment-to-population ratio for working-age people with disabilities (ages 16-64) increased from 33.2 percent in October 2021, to 35.5 percent in October 2022 (up 6.9 percent or 2.3 percentage points). For working-age people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the employment-to-population ratio also increased from 73.5 percent in October 2021 to 74.6 percent in October 2022 (up 1.5 percent or 1.1 percentage points).

Similarly, for people with disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate increased from 36.8 percent in October 2021 to 38.7 percent in October 2022 (up 5.2 percent or 1.9 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate also increased from 76.6 percent in October 2021 to 77.1 percent in October 2022 (up 0.7 percent or 0.5 percentage points).

In October 2022 among workers ages 16-64, the 5,883,000 workers with disabilities represented 4.0 percent of the total 148,031,000 workers in the U.S.

CAPTION

This graphic compares the labor market indicators for October 2021 and October 2022, showing increases for people with and without disabilities.

CREDIT

Kessler Foundation

Ask Questions about Disability and Employment

Each nTIDE release is followed by an nTIDE Lunch & Learn online webinar. This live broadcast, hosted via Zoom Webinar, offers attendees Q&A on the latest nTIDE findings, provides news and updates from the field, as well as invited panelists to discuss current disability-related findings and events. On November 4, 2022 at 12:00 pm Eastern, Jhillika Kumar, founder and CEO of Mentra, the world’s largest neurodiversity employment network, joins Drs. Houtenville and O’Neill, and Denise Rozell, Policy Strategist at Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD). Join our Lunch & Learns live or visit the nTIDE archives at: ResearchonDisability.org/nTIDE.

NOTE: The statistics in the nTIDE are based on Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers but are not identical. They are customized by UNH to combine the statistics for men and women of working age (16 to 64). nTIDE is funded, in part, by grants from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) (90RT5037) and Kessler Foundation.

About the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire

The Institute on Disability (IOD) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was established in 1987 to provide a university-based focus for the improvement of knowledge, policies, and practices related to the lives of persons with disabilities and their families. For information on the NIDILRR-funded Research and Training Center on Disability Statistics, visit ResearchOnDisability.org.

About Kessler Foundation

Kessler Foundation, a major nonprofit organization in the field of disability, is a global leader in rehabilitation research that seeks to improve cognition, mobility, and long-term outcomes – including employment – for people with neurological disabilities caused by diseases and injuries of the brain and spinal cord. Kessler Foundation leads the nation in funding innovative programs that expand opportunities for employment for people with disabilities. For more information, visit KesslerFoundation.org.

Stay Connected with Kessler Foundation

Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Instagram | iTunes & SoundCloud

To interview an expert, contact:

Deborah Hauss, DHauss@kesslerfoundation.org;

Carolann Murphy, CMurphy@KesslerFoundation.org.

CABBI team adds powerful new dimension to phenotyping next-gen bioenergy crop

3-D imaging, combined with machine learning, helps measure growth and expedite breeding in miscanthus

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABILITY, ENERGY, AND ENVIRONMENT

 

IMAGE: AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (DRONE) COLLECTS IMAGES OVER A CABBI MISCANTHUS SACCHARIFLORUS FIELD TRIAL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN ENERGY FARM IN OCTOBER 2020. view more 

CREDIT: CENTER FOR ADVANCED BIOENERGY AND BIOFUELS INNOVATION (CABBI)

Miscanthus is one of the most promising perennial crops for bioenergy production since it is able to produce high yields with a small environmental footprint. This versatile grass has great potential to perform even better, as much less effort has been put into improving it through breeding relative to established commodity crops such as maize or soybean.

However, breeding must become faster and more efficient if it is to reach the potential for sustainable and resilient biomass production in miscanthus. A key bottleneck in the process is the ability to measure the growth of thousands of varieties of the crop in the field and select the small number of varieties that perform best. This requires new, sophisticated technologies for capturing data and analyzing it.

A study by researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) demonstrated how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) combined with cutting-edge machine learning methods can assist the selection of the best candidate genotypes in miscanthus breeding programs. The team used neural nets — computer systems modeled on the human brain and nervous system — to analyze very high-resolution aerial imagery and identify key miscanthus traits during the crop’s growing season.

In particular, the CABBI researchers highlighted that using neural networks that are designed to analyze data in three-dimensions (two dimensions in space, plus time) allowed better estimates of crop traits (flowering time, height, and biomass production) than traditional neural networks that analyze data in only two dimensions in space. This allowed them to leverage information on how each of the thousands of plants in the field change over time. In addition, the three-dimensional neural network proved able to automatically perform aspects of the image analysis process (i.e., finding plants in the image) which in many other cases requires substantial manual intervention that would slow the process down.

This is especially important in highly productive perennial grasses such as miscanthus, where in-field phenotyping is more challenging as well as more rewarding.

The study, published in Remote Sensing, was led by Postdoctoral Researcher Sebastian Varela at CABBI, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Bioenergy Research Center; Andrew Leakey, CABBI Director, Professor and Head of the Department of Plant Biology, and Professor at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), Department of Crop Sciences, and the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Erik Sacks, CABBI’s Deputy Theme Leader for Feedstock Production and Professor of Crop Sciences and IGB at Illinois.

It was the first attempt to use data-intensive monitoring of large, genetically diverse populations of miscanthus using digital technologies. For their assessment, researchers used drones to capture high-resolution images of crops 10 times during the growing season, together with ground-based data for thousands of miscanthus genotypes, to determine their flowering time, height, and biomass yield. The imaging combined photogrammetry, which provides digital surface models, and multispectral sensing technology that can obtain images not visible to the human eye.

“This is an exciting step toward developing digital applications that can ease the selection of the best candidate genotypes for a fraction of the cost of traditional manual screening,” Leakey said. “That is just one key step in the broader work CABBI is doing to deliver the scientific understanding and technological advances needed to make environmentally beneficial and profitable bioenergy a reality for the Central U.S.”

Said Sacks: “Our standard methods for measuring miscanthus traits, like yield and height, take a long time and a lot of labor, but these new imaging methods are faster and much less expensive. With the newer methods, we can evaluate larger populations of miscanthus for the same money — and that will enable us to select better breeding lines and cultivars more quickly.”

Co-authors on the study included Ph.D. student Xuying Zheng, undergraduate Dylan P. Allen, and research technician Jeremy Ruhter, all with CABBI and Crop Sciences; and Ph.D. student Joyce N. Njuguna of Crop Sciences.

Read the full paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/21/5333/htm

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JOURNAL

Remote Sensing

DOI

10.3390/rs14215333 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Exploit High-Spatial- and -Temporal-Resolution Aerial Imagery to Phenotype Key Traits in Miscanthus

Endangered Devils Hole pupfish is one of the most inbred animals known

Inbreeding has caused at least 15 gene deletions, and homogenized its genome

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY

 

IMAGE: CHRIS MARTIN OF UC BERKELEY STANDING NEAR DEVILS HOLE, THE SOLE RESIDENCE OF THE DEVILS HOLE PUPFISH. THE POOL GETS DIRECT SUN ONLY NINE MONTHS OF THE YEAR, AND THE PUPFISH RELY FOR FOOD ON ALGAE GROWING ON THE ROCK SHELF VISIBLE IN THE PHOTO. view more 

CREDIT: JENNIFER GUMM

As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.

Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, live in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.

New research now documents the extreme effect that these harsh and isolated conditions have had on this fish’s genetic diversity.

In a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of California, Berkeley, biologists report the first complete genome sequences of eight pupfish species from the American Southwest — 30 individuals in all, including eight Devils Hole pupfish. Astoundingly, the Devils Hole pupfish is so inbred that 58% of the genomes of these eight individuals are identical, on average.

“High levels of inbreeding are associated with a higher risk of extinction, and the inbreeding in the Devils Hole pupfish is equal to or more severe than levels reported so far in other isolated natural populations, such as the Isle Royale wolves in Michigan, mountain gorillas in Africa and Indian tigers,” said lead researcher Christopher Martin, UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology and curator of ichthyology in the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “Although we were not able to directly measure fitness, the increased inbreeding in these pupfish likely results in a substantial reduction in fitness.”

Other pupfish species are also inbred, the researchers found, but only between 10% and 30% of their genomes are identical.

Graduate student David Tian, lead author of the study, said that the level of inbreeding in the Devils Hole pupfish is equivalent to what would happen if four to five generations of siblings mated with one another. This tends to burn in or fix, rather than weed out, harmful mutations, potentially dooming a population to extinction by mutational meltdown. The Devils Hole pupfish species is currently doing well in the wild and in captive or “refuge” populations, but such low genetic diversity could spell trouble as the climate changes and human impacts become greater.

In the face of these potential threats, the new genome sequences will help scientists and conservationists assess the health of native pupfish populations and potentially intervene in refuge populations to increase the genetic diversity of these species — the Devils Hole pupfish, in particular.

“With this new genomic data, there's a lot of potential to look not just at genetic diversity and how these species are related to each other phylogenetically, but also look at inbreeding and mutation load to get an idea of what their current status is, how evolutionary history may have influenced their current genetic variation, and think about where the population is going and what we should do, if anything, to preserve these species,” Tian said.

Population decline and rescue

Pupfish species are scattered around the globe and tend to like isolated lakes and springs, often with extreme conditions that most fish would find unsurvivable. About 30 species inhabit warm, salty desert springs and streams in California and Nevada. Martin has studied various pupfish populations, including several on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, to understand the genetics behind their adaptation to extreme conditions and unusual ecological niches.

The Devils Hole pupfish, however, is unique in its small range and perilous existence, Martin said, making its fluctuating population in the wild worrisome to conservationists.

“Part of the question about these declines is whether they may be due to the genetic health of the population,” Martin said. “Maybe the declines are because there are harmful mutations that have become fixed because the population is so small.”

The small population is partly a result of human incursions into their habitat, Martin noted. Local ranchers and developers pumped groundwater in the region in the 1960s and ‘70s that drastically reduced the water level in Devils Hole, leading to a drop in population levels. A 1976 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the federal government to limit groundwater pumping saved Devils Hole and the resident population, while captive breeding at a nearby 100,000-gallon pool in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge rescued the species. Nevertheless, a decline in the 1990s led the wild population to its nadir in 2013: 35 individuals. The wild population has since recovered, while the refuge population has ballooned to about 400, twice the wild population.

Humans are not totally to blame for the lack of genetic diversity in the Devils Hole pupfish, however. The UC Berkeley researchers also sequenced the genome of a pupfish collected in 1980 and held at the University of Michigan. It showed inbreeding and a lack of genetic diversity similar to that found in individuals collected recently, most of which died a natural death. This implies that the pupfish has likely seen population bottlenecks frequently over hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

One result of this, Martin and Tian found, is that 15 genes have disappeared entirely from the Devils Hole pupfish genome. Five of them seem to be involved in adaptation to living in low-oxygen or hypoxic environments.

“These deletions are a paradox, because this is a habitat where you're most exposed to hypoxia,” Martin said. “It could have something to do with the stability of the habitat over time. But it looks to us like the hypoxia pathway is broken. Once you break one gene, it doesn't really matter if you break additional genes in that regulatory pathway. Our future work is to actually look at what these deletions do. Do they increase tolerance of hypoxia? Do they decrease tolerance of hypoxia? I think those two scenarios are equally plausible at this time.”

Selective breeding within a captive population of Devils Hole pupfish could help increase the diversity and perhaps save the species from eventual extinction, he said. And to restore genes already lost, CRISPR genome editing could add them back.

The fact that the genome of the fish collected in 1980 was about as inbred as today’s fish is “maybe good news,” Martin said, “in that the population has historically been highly inbred with very low genetic diversity, suggesting that the recent decline in the ‘90s, with population bottlenecks to only 35 fish in 2013 and 38 fish in 2007, doesn't seem to have had much of an effect.”

Tian is currently analyzing about 150 complete genome sequences of nine species of American pupfish to get a more complete picture of the deleterious mutations and gene deletions in the various Southwestern populations. He sees the study as an example of what conservation genomics can do for endangered and possibly inbred populations around the world.

“We're on a really cool cusp when it comes to using genomic data and applying it to conservation, especially at a time where it's a problem that is likely only going to get worse with climate change and increased habitat fragmentation and just anthropogenic changes,” he said.

Tian is leery of genetic interventions, however, since little is known about how genes influence the physical and behavioral characteristics of a species and how this relates to fitness and adaptation to a specific environment. Conservation should still be a priority.

“The answer is still increased funding for these populations, protecting habitats, legal avenues for protecting these species and figuring out ways for humans and these endangered species to coexist on this planet,” he said.

Co-authors with Martin and Tian are Austin Patton of UC Berkeley and Bruce Turner of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The work is funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, National Science Foundation (1749764) and National Institutes of Health (5R01DE027052-02).

A curious, captive-raised Devils Hole pupfish at the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility in Nevada. The facility maintains a refuge population of pupfish as a backup to the wild population, which fluctuates over decades and once dipped to a mere 35 individuals.

CREDIT

Olin Feuerbacher/USFWS

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.1561 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Severe inbreeding, increased mutation load and gene loss-of-function in the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

TONGA

Scientists identify the highest-ever recorded volcanic plume

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

 

IMAGE: A ZOOMED-IN VIEW OF THE ERUPTION, TAKEN BY JAPAN'S HIMAWARI-8 SATELLITE AT 05:40 UTC ON 15 JANUARY 2022, ABOUT 100 MINUTES AFTER THE ERUPTION STARTED. PHOTO CREDIT: SIMON PROUD / UNI OXFORD, RALSPACE NCEO / JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY view more 

CREDIT: SIMON PROUD / UNI OXFORD, RALSPACE NCEO / JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY

Using images captured by satellites, researchers in the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and RAL Space have confirmed that the January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano produced the highest-ever recorded plume. The colossal eruption is also the first to have been directly observed to have broken through to the mesosphere layer of the atmosphere. The results have been published today in the journal Science.

On 15 January 2022, Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the Tongan archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean, violently erupted. The explosion was one of the most powerful ever observed, sending shock waves around the world and triggering devastating tsunamis that left thousands homeless. A towering column of ash and water was ejected into the atmosphere – but until now, scientists lacked an accurate way to measure just how tall this was.

Normally, the height of a volcanic plume can be estimated by measuring the temperature recorded at the top by infrared-based satellites and comparing this to a reference vertical temperature profile. This is because in the troposphere (the first and lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere), temperature decreases with height. But if the eruption is so large that the plume penetrates into the next layer of the atmosphere (the stratosphere), this method becomes ambiguous because the temperature begins to increase again with height (due to the ozone layer absorbing solar ultraviolet radiation).

To overcome this problem, the researchers used a novel method based on a phenomenon called ‘the parallax effect’. This is the apparent difference in an object’s position when viewed from multiple lines of sight. You can see this for yourself by closing your right eye, and holding out one hand with the thumb raised upwards. If you then switch eyes, so that your left is closed and your right is open, your thumb will appear to shift slightly against the background. By measuring this apparent change in position and combining this with the known distance between your eyes, you can calculate the distance to your thumb.

The location of the Tonga volcano is covered by three geostationary weather satellites, so the researchers were able to apply the parallax effect to the aerial images these captured. Crucially, during the eruption itself, the satellites recorded images every 10 minutes, enabling the rapid changes in the plume’s trajectory to be documented.

The results showed that the plume reached an altitude of 57 kilometres at its highest extent. This is significantly higher than the previous record-holders: the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines (40 km at its highest point), and the 1982 eruption of El Chichón in Mexico (31 km). It also makes the plume the first observational evidence of a volcanic eruption injecting material through the stratosphere and directly into the mesosphere, which starts at about 50 km above the Earth’s surface.

Lead author Dr Simon Proud (University of Oxford, RAL Space and the National Centre for Earth Observation), said: ‘It’s an extraordinary result as we have never seen a cloud of any type this tall before. Furthermore, the ability to estimate the height in the way we did (using the parallax method) is only possible now that we have good satellite coverage. It wouldn't have been possible a decade or so ago.’

The Oxford researchers now intend to construct an automated system to compute the heights of volcano plumes using the parallax method. Co-author Dr Andrew Prata from the Sub-department of Atmospheric, Oceanic & Planetary Physics added: ‘We’d also like to apply this technique to other eruptions and develop a dataset of plume heights that can be used by volcanologists and atmospheric scientists to model the dispersion of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. Further science questions that we would like to understand are: Why did the Tonga plume go so high? What will be the climate impacts of this eruption? And what exactly was the plume composed of?’

Besides the University of Oxford, the study also involved the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and National Centre for Earth Observation in Harwell, and Munich University of Applied Sciences.

Notes:

The paper ‘The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano reached the mesosphere’ will be published in Science on 3 November at 14:00 ET /18:00 GMT. To view the manuscript before this, contact the Science editorial board: scipak@aaas.org

For media enquiries, contact Dr Caroline Wood, University of Oxford: caroline.wood@admin.ox.ac.uk

A zoomed-in view of the eruption, taken by Japan's Himawari-8 satellite at 04:50 UTC on 15 January 2022, about 50 minutes after the eruption started. 

A zoomed-in view of the eruption, taken by Japan's Himawari-8 satellite at 04:10 UTC on 15 January 2022, about 10 minutes after the eruption started. 

The full Earth disk seen by Japan's Himawari-8 satellite, the volcanic eruption is in the lower right. Image credit: Simon Proud / Uni Oxford, RALSpace NCEO / Japan Meteorological Agency.

Animated height map (IMAGE)

Tonga eruption (VIDEO)

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abo4076 

ARTICLE TITLE

The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano reached the mesosphere

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Nov-2022