The value of people’s values: Study shows how relational values contribute towards sustainability

New study underscores the significance of relational values in improving people’s participation in the sustainable management of social-ecological systems

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RITSUMEIKAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THE STUDY HIGHLIGHTS THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONAL VALUES IN GAINING PEOPLE’S SUPPORT FOR SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN SESS. THESE RELATIONAL VALUES WERE ALSO FOUND TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH PRO-SES BEHAVIOR, WHICH CAN HELP MAKE SES MANAGEMENT PLANS SUCCESSFUL. view more 

CREDIT: TAKURO UEHARA FROM RITSUMEIKAN UNIVERSITY

In today’s world of excess, human-nature dynamics have become quite distorted and exploitative. Therefore, sustainable and mindful coexistence within our natural ecosystems has become the need of the hour. This is where sustainable social-ecological systems (SESs) come into play. SESs are complex adaptive systems that envelope the intricate interactions between people and their surroundings. Effectual SES management requires balancing the improvement of human well-being along with conservation of ecosystem integrity. However, the success of an SES management plan rests upon the understanding, support, and participation of the people of the SES. To ensure this support and involvement, it is integral that management decisions align with people’s wishes and the values they place on their natural environment.

Earlier studies have mainly focused on the instrumental and intrinsic values of nature. Instrumental value pertains to the necessity of something in achieving a particular end, whereas intrinsic value is when the thing is desirable in itself. However, few studies have looked into the significance of relational values of nature. These are values that arise from human–nature connectedness and encompass a sense of place, identity, and well-being that can motivate environmental stewardship. Overcoming this paucity of research, a new study from Japan, which was published in Frontiers in Marine Science on December 8, 2022, has become the first to quantitatively reveal the essential role of relational values in people’s readiness to participate in and support SES management. “Relational values are preferences associated with positive human-nature relationships that are valued by people. Our research shows that by managing SESs that respect these relationships, SESs can become a more desirable state,” says Prof. Takuro Uehara, a professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, and the lead researcher of the study.

Residents from three SESs surrounding the Seto Inland Sea in Japan were surveyed for the study. These included people from Kobe-Hanshin (N=1136), Harima (N=864), and Kagawa (N=1000). The study evaluated how relational values affect people’s proclivity towards sustaining their SES. This was measured by pro-SES behavior scales that were specifically designed for the studied SESs. These one-of-a-kind behavior-measuring scales included factors related to the sustainable utilization of natural resources and active human interaction with nature. These scales were created to be in line with the local conservation policies and the Japanese concept of ‘satoumi’ — human–nature interactions that enhance ecosystem services while conserving nature.

The study found that while relational values correlate and overlap with instrumental and intrinsic values to some degree, they are also non-substitutable and important in their own right for the successful management of SESs. The study shows that integrating relational values — either as a single value class or as part of pooled values — is crucial for gaining the public’s support for SES management. It also demonstrates that fostering such relational values can promote pro-SES behavior among people. This can be achieved by improving environmental education, encouraging the consumption of locally sourced foods, and increasing opportunities for more nature-based leisure activities for the community. These results resonated across the three SESs, despite their social, demographic, cultural, and environmental differences.

Overall, this study makes a strong case for incorporating relational values into SES management plans in order to achieve a desirable state of SESs, which is both human- and ecosystem-centric. “Relational values are typically place-based, and our study shows that these values can uniquely and meaningfully contribute towards understanding pro-SES behavior, which could have important management implications for individual SESs. In order to create a systemic change towards sustainability, relational values can be a deep leverage point since people are generally more willing to be involved in activities that support what they value,” comments Prof. Uehara.

Perhaps it is high time that relational values are given due credit in helping make SESs and the world more sustainable.

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Reference

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.1001180  

 

About Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Ritsumeikan University is one of the most prestigious private universities in Japan. Its main campus is in Kyoto, where inspiring settings await researchers. With an unwavering objective to generate social symbiotic values and emergent talents, it aims to emerge as a next-generation research university. It will enhance researcher potential by providing support best suited to the needs of young and leading researchers, according to their career stage. Ritsumeikan University also endeavors to build a global research network as a “knowledge node” and disseminate achievements internationally, thereby contributing to the resolution of social/humanistic issues through interdisciplinary research and social implementation.

Website: http://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/

 

About Professor Takuro Uehara from Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Dr. Takuro Uehara is a Professor at the College of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University in Osaka, Japan. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Science with a focus on Economics from Portland State University, USA. He currently works on issues related to social-ecological systems, primarily using systems science and economics. His current research topics include social-ecological modeling, the economic valuation of nature, sustainability, resilience, satoumi, relational values, and marine plastic pollution. Prof. Uehara has also authored research papers published in leading journals in the field, including Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society, Ecosystem Services, Journal of Environmental Management, People and Nature, and Sustainability Science.

 

Funding information

This study was supported by the Japan Society for The Promotion of Science [Grant/Award Number: 18H03432].

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Marine Science

DOI

10.3389/fmars.2022.1001180 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The importance of relational values in gaining people’s support and promoting their involvement in social-ecological system management: A comparative analysis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Dec-2022

Scientists' use of hydrogel materials leads to stem cells developing like human embryos

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Materials scientists at UNSW Sydney have shown that human pluripotent stem cells in a lab can initiate a process resembling the gastrulation phase – where cells begin differentiating into new cell types – much earlier than occurs in mother nature.

For an embryo developing in the womb, gastrulation occurs at day 14. But in a dish in a lab at UNSW’s Kensington campus, Scientia Associate Professor Kris Kilian oversaw an experiment where a gastrulation-like event was triggered within two days of culturing human stem cells in a unique biomaterial that, as it turned out, set the conditions to mimic this stage of embryo development.

“Gastrulation is the key step that leads to the human body plan,” says A/Prof. Kilian.

“It is the start of the process where a simple sheet of cells transforms to make up all the tissues of the body – nerves, cardiovascular and blood tissue and structural tissue like muscle and bone. But we haven’t really been able to study the process in humans because you can’t study this in the lab without taking  developing embryonic tissue.”

“So it’s really exciting that we were able to see this happening in vitro.”

The achievement, which was reported today in the journal Advanced Science, has not only implications for our understanding of human embryonic development, but also new treatments in medicine including cell therapy, targeted drug development and CRISPR gene-editing technologies.

The most important time in your life

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert once said: “It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.” Gastrulation is the key event in an embryo’s development when a mass of undifferentiated cells begin the first steps of a long journey in the womb towards formation of a human being. This is one of the reasons that work on embryos left over from IVF is forbidden beyond 14 days, when gastrulation occurs.

A/Prof Kilian says that up until now, it has been difficult to study this process in humans because of obvious ethical constraints.

“Controlling gastrulation using materials alone will provide an entirely new way for studying human development,” he says.

“We currently can’t do this because embryo research beyond 14 days is often viewed as unethical, and it’s currently impossible in vivo because you’d need to observe an embryo in a pregnant human mother.”

But while there are animal models to study – such as mice and zebrafish – and other researchers have induced gastrulation-like events in the lab using chemicals including growth factors, this is the first time culture conditions alone have initiated gastrulation outside of a human body.

“Our method could lead to a new approach to mimic human embryogenesis outside of a person,” A/Prof Kilian says.

Miniature organs and CRISPR gene splicing

In the medical sciences, the ability to induce gastrulation in ‘synthetic’ embryos like those created by the UNSW team could also help in creating body tissue or even miniature organs based on a patient’s own genetic code. These so-called ‘organoids’, which are barely visible to the naked eye, are already being developed using stem cells for medical research, such as testing the effectiveness of certain drugs. But the process requires chemicals to stimulate the cells into forming differentiated organ tissue which is time consuming and expensive.

A/Prof. Kilian says controlling gastrulation by using only hydrogel materials to stimulate what happens naturally could be a quicker and more cost-effective solution.

“The thing that really excites us about this is the potential to make therapeutically useful cells much faster and more reproducible,” says A/Prof. Kilian.

“Our method could provide a way to initiate ‘organogenesis’ – with an array of hundreds of well-defined cell aggregates in a single well – leading to faster and more well-defined structures that could then be turned into brain, liver, gut, potentially any solid organ tissue.

“This approach could also revolutionise drug development including RNA and CRISPR/Cas9 approaches by providing a more reproducible way to mimic human tissue in a lab. For instance, you could make an organoid from a patient’s cells, then test therapies aimed at correcting mutations or restoring function.”

A hydrogel home is just right

The secret to the success of the UNSW team’s work in the lab is in the structure of the culture that the stem cells were seeded into. Using a technique adapted from the semiconductor industry, defined regions are fabricated across a hydrogel for cells to stick to. This combination of geometric confinement and the soft gel that mimics the surface of a human uterus coaxes the cells to start gastrulation-like processes.

“We discovered that if you take pluripotent stem cells and you put them in a very confined and soft environment, it’s akin to what the cells might experience in a mother's uterus,” says A/Prof. Kilian.

“That viscoelastic, soft, squishy material gives them just enough cues that they initiate this gastrulation-like process all on their own.”

This contrasts greatly with the standard practice that’s been used in labs more recently that forces a type of gastrulation process using growth factors and chemical supplements on hard plastic or glass dishes.

“Unsurprisingly, previous research culturing stem cells on glass or plastic have failed to recapitulate the signals that happen in a body. But using our soft substrates mimicking embryonic tissue, we can coax the cells to spatially organise and begin the early morphogenesis that could ultimately create a person.”

But, A/Prof. Kilian cautions, while the team has discovered the conditions that emulate the first stage of gastrulation, it doesn’t appear to go any further.

“We can’t make a person this way,” he says.

“This method only demonstrates the early, but very crucial stage in development. The impact lies in being able to study this all-important stage of human development, and to use the generated structures for developing therapies.”

Serendipity can be a big part of discovery

As with most great discoveries in science, serendipity played a role. The team weren’t actively looking to bring on gastrulation when they dropped some stem cells onto the hydrogel substrate.

Lead author Dr Pallavi Srivastava was surprised by what she observed.

“Initially I was trying to get stem cells to attach to our hydrogels and planned to differentiate them in the conventional way,” she says.

“The difference between cells cultured on glass and those on our gels was very striking. I remember thinking, ‘wow, something is going on here. I need to investigate’. This led to a big shift in my project, and ultimately this exciting discovery.”

The researchers are hopeful they can continue exploring the benefits of their discovery by understanding how materials can guide embryogenesis and beyond. A/Prof. Kilian says that while this finding is exciting, more work is needed to guide the gastrulation-like processes to form useful tissues.

“This is really the first step in what we hope is a platform technology for producing useful tissue models. Triggering gastrulation is not enough – now we need to provide other signals to keep differentiation going.”

Discovering the next set of materials signals may allow creation of virtually any solid tissue for research purposes, A/Prof. Kilian says, and for generating useful cell types for regenerative medicine.

“Considering pluripotent stem cells can now be generated from blood or tissue samples, the future is wide open for regenerating tissues and organs from a patient’s own cells.”

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JOURNAL

Advanced Science

DOI

10.1002/advs.202203614 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Human embryos

ARTICLE TITLE

Defined microenvironments trigger in vitro gastrulation in human pluripotent stem cells

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Dec-2022

Management strategy makes a difference in C-section rates, study finds

The business strategies adopted by physician practice management companies influence rates of Cesarean sections for low-risk patients.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

For physicians, it seems like a no-brainer: Management experts, often private equity firms, offer to take over the logistical and financial drudgery of their practices, leaving the doctors to focus on patient care.

A new Haas School of Business study found that the business strategies used by physician practice management companies (PPMCs) also impact patient care.

The study, published in the journal Management Science, examined the strategies adopted by PPMC-owned obstetrician and gynecologist practices and found they influenced rates of Cesarean sections for low-risk patients.

Specifically, OB-GYN practices acquired by PPMCs that focus on patient and clinical management lead to significantly lower rates of C-sections. PPMC-owned practices that focus on providing financial management services lead to higher C-section rates.

“Even though PPMCs say they preserve physician autonomy, managerial changes do appear to influence physician treatment choices,” said study author Ambar La Forgia, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

Value-based management vs financial management

La Forgia tracked three PPMC-owned practices that together accounted for more than 40% of Florida’s OB-GYNs between 2006 to 2014. One PPMC focused on attracting “value” based contracts, which link payment to clinical performance by providing clinical management services, while two focused on raising revenue by providing financial management services and negotiating higher-paying fee-for-service contracts, which link payment to quantity of services.

C-sections are more profitable than vaginal births because insurance companies typically pay out more in reimbursements. So a rise in the number of C-sections can raise a red flag, causing doubts about whether some of those performed on mothers at low risk for childbirth complications are necessary. Unnecessary C-sections can increase risks for both mother and infant in a myriad of ways.

Divergence in C-section rates

La Forgia found a remarkable divergence: The OB-GYN practice that focused on clinical management cut C-sections for low-risk women by 22%. Those that focused on financial management showed a 10% to 11% rise in C-sections.

“What surprised me was finding that one of these for-profit management companies lowered C-sections,” La Forgia said. “It’s a pleasant surprise that leads to a more nuanced story to tell, because you can’t make a blanket statement about PPMCs.’”

La Forgia turned to Florida to track how physician practices performed after a PPMC takeover because public information laws include hospital discharge records that allowed her to link patient records to individual doctors and practices.

Low-risk mothers

The study concentrated on records for 1.26 million women who were at low risk for C-sections (defined as single live babies born after 37 weeks to women with no prior C-section and in the vertex, or headfirst, presentation). The births were overseen by 1,693 physicians, with C-section rates of 24% for low-risk patients.

La Forgia also hand-collected marketing materials to track and parse the details of a PPMC’s management approach. For example, the PPMC that focused on clinical management advertised providing clinical data tracking and analytics to help standardize care and attract value-based contracts. “This was a forward-looking strategy because it can take a while to improve quality and negotiate these types of contracts, especially since they were not very common within the time period of this study,” La Forgia said.

Another notable data point: the two financially managed PPMCs performed more C-sections on privately insured patients than those insured by Medicaid, the government insurance program that typically covers people with lower incomes. Florida, La Forgia notes, is one of the few states where Medicaid reimburses physicians at the same rate for C-sections and vaginal births.

Growing influence of PPMCs

In today’s healthcare landscape, physicians generally have the option to keep running their own practice, sell to a hospital, or sell to a PPMC. Why choose a PPMC over a hospital? Autonomy, La Forgia said. Under hospital ownership, doctors typically become salaried employees of the hospital.

“PPMCs advertise themselves as an alternative to hospitals while still being relatively independent and getting to stay in private practice,” La Forgia said. However, “This research shows that even PPMCs claiming to preserve physician autonomy can alter clinical outcomes for better or for worse.”

The influence of PPMCs on patient care has only increased in the years beyond those covered by this study, La Forgia writes. By 2019, the three PPMCs she examined delivered roughly 1 in every 25 babies in the United States.

“Although I find that PPMCs influence C-sections regardless of changes in competition, the PPMCs do amass considerable market power, and their growth may eventually lead to more salient anticompetitive effects,” La Forgia writes in the study.

La Forgia noted that in recent years there’s been a noticeable shift in philosophy among some PPMCs to pursue value-based contracts over fee-for-service contracts.

“In fact, a lot of the [PPMCs] that originally billed themselves as financial management companies have changed their offerings to focus more on population health once they saw that this is a potentially lucrative angle,” she said. “That may be a good sign for patients.”

Read the full paper:

The Impact of Management on Clinical Performance: Evidence from Physician Practice Management Companies
By Ambar La Forgia
Management Science, November 2022

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JOURNAL

Management Science

DOI

10.1287/mnsc.2022.4571 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The Impact of Management on Clinical Performance: Evidence from Physician Practice Management Companies

Tackling crowd management in subways during pandemics

Sharon Di wins NSF grant to work with NYC’s MTA to develop machine learning and traffic models to optimize traffic flow during pandemics

Grant and Award Announcement

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: SHARON DI view more 

CREDIT: NA

Mass transit, and subways in particular, are essential to the economic viability and environmental sustainability of cities across the globe. But public transit was hit hard during the COVID pandemic and subways especially experienced substantial drops in ridership. Spurred on by a Columbia Engineering Transit Design Challenge in 2020, researchers from across the University have been collaborating on a project to strengthen both the preparedness and resilience of transit communities facing public health disasters.

The team, led by Civil Engineering Professor Sharon Di, recently won a $2,500,000 four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to tackle crowd management in subways. The project--”Preparing for Future Pandemics: Subway Crowd Management to Minimize Airborne Transmission of Respiratory Viruses”--is focused on developing a system for public transit communities, including riders, workers, and agencies, that will help transit riders to make informed decisions and adapt travel behavior accordingly and provide transit agencies engaged in planning and policymaking with recommendations for mitigating virus transmission risks to riders and workers. 

“We think our system, which we’re calling Way-CARE, will be transformative, especially for people in low-income communities who are among the most impacted by reduced accessibility to safer travel modes,” said Di, who is a leader in transportation management. “We expect our project to improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of those who live, work, and travel within cities.” 

Credit: Kits Pix/Shutterstock

The team, which includes Co-PIs Jeffrey Shaman (Columbia Climate School; Mailman School of Public Health); Marco Giometto, Xiaofan Jiang, and Faye McNeill (Columbia Engineering); Ester Fuchs (School of International and Public Affairs); and Kai Ruggeri (Columbia University Irving Medical Center), is working with New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and local rider communities in Harlem and at Columbia on the Way-CARE project. They hope that their system will enable smart city transit operators to access real-time sensing information collected from subway stations and/or trains for crowd management.

The researchers are integrating sensing and crowd and airflow modeling with public health expertise on a microscale applied to subway crowd management. They are developing coupled airborne dispersion and epidemiological models that account for microscale processes--the transport of droplets and aerosols--that affect respiratory virus transmission. In addition, they are integrating behavioral science data that will help inform travel choices and policy making. 

“This is an important interdisciplinary collaboration,” said Shaman, an epidemiologist who is a leader in infectious disease modeling. “The transmission of respiratory viruses is not directly observed, and the microscale processes influencing infection risk are not well known. Our project will address these shortcomings by advancing understanding of the physical, biological, and behavioral features that enable transmission of respiratory viruses in subway settings, and equip transit officials and the public with real-time information that improves worker and rider safety.”

Pandemic’s many effects on older women documented in journal

Peer-Reviewed Publication

THE GERONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

A new supplemental issue to The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, titled “The Impact, Experience, and Challenges of COVID-19: The Women’s Health Initiative  (WHI),” explores key areas on how older women initially responded to the threat of COVID-19, their concerns about the pandemic, and aspects of their prior health and well-being that may have influenced the impact of COVID-19 on their lives. 

 

The WHI represents one of the largest and most diverse longitudinal studies conducted in postmenopausal women. Three decades after its 1992 launch, 52,543 women continue to be actively engaged in the core of this landmark study, with a mean age of 86.6 (ranging from 73 to 106 years of age). The WHI is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the journal supplement was made possible by support from Wake Forest University Health Sciences.

 

The supplement’s articles are based on survey research conducted among 49,695 WHI participants between June and October 2020. In addition to the data derived from the survey, authors were able to draw from detailed historical data available on the participants prior to the pandemic, as well as annual data collected concurrently with the COVID-19 survey. A follow-up survey was conducted from June to December 2021.

 

“The long history of participation preceding COVID-19 and continued participation in study activities during COVID-19 allowed for a deep characterization of the impact and experience among older women, while accounting for past and current individual health behaviors and outcomes,” wrote guest editors Sally A. Shumaker, PhD, Andrea Z. LaCroix, PhD, and Jennifer W. Bea, PhD.

 

The researchers’ findings showed that the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with impacts on health and well-being, living situations, lifestyle, health care access, and SARS-CoV-2 testing and preventive behaviors.

 

WHI participants were more likely to report very good or good levels of well-being, but in lower frequency in the fall of 2020 compared to the summer. Respondents reported being very concerned about the pandemic (more commonly reported among urban residents), with many participating in preventive behaviors including wearing a face mask (which were more commonly practiced in the summer compared to the fall).

 

The most common disruption in living arrangements included having family or friends move in, although a higher proportion of respondents in the fall compared to the summer reported moving into a care facility and/or having their care provider come to help. Many women reported changes in medication and health care access, which included delays in getting prescriptions filled and health care appointment conversions to telephone or online (the latter more commonly reported among urban residents).

 

There were notable changes in lifestyle factors; for example, over half of women reported less physical activity or exercise compared to before the pandemic, which was more commonly reported among women residing in urban areas. A lower proportion of women reported consuming alcohol compared to reports from prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

“While the women in the WHI demonstrated remarkable resiliency overall, these findings help guide our response to those multifaceted social, psychological, and physical struggles and comorbidities that are not only associated with COVID-19 infection in an older population, but also with the societal and infrastructure barriers in the context of the COVID-19 era,” Shumaker, LaCroix, and Bea wrote. “As COVID-19 and our societal response to it evolves, it is important to continue to study the impact on high-risk groups, such as the older women in the WHI.”

 

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The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences is a peer-reviewed publication of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation’s oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to research, education, and practice in the field of aging. The principal mission of the Society — and its 5,500+ members — is to advance the study of aging and disseminate information among scientists, decision makers, and the general public. GSA’s structure also includes a policy institute, the National Academy on an Aging Society.

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JOURNAL

The Journals of Gerontology Series A

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not res

Critical care medicine organizations urge house leadership to stop Medicare payment cuts

Business Announcement

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGIST

CHICAGO – Today, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists (SOCCA), and Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) sent a formal communication to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Charles Schumer, and House Minority leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, strongly urging them to take immediate action to stop pending Medicare physician payment cuts.

The medical organizations called on Congress to block all pending payment cuts for critical care services and the services of other physicians. Without congressional action, the cuts will be effective January 1, 2023.

“Critical care physicians provide advanced life support, specialized monitoring and sophisticated, high level medical care to patients with life-threatening health conditions,” said ASA President Michael W. Champeau, M.D., FASA. “It is essential the Congress support the health care leadership consistently demonstrated by these professionals.” 

“Congress must work to ensure that there is sufficient economic support, especially from Medicare, to ensure patients’ access to high-quality critical care services,” said SOCCA President Michael H. Wall, M.D., FCCM, FASA.

“In recent years, critical care medicine has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, caring for some of the most medically challenging patients seen since the critical care specialty was created, especially at-risk Medicare patients with multiple medical diseases or conditions in the high-risk environments,” according to SCCM President, Sandra L. Kane-Gill, PharmD, MSc, FCCM.

The communication notes that “Medicare payments for critical care services are already broken. Payment freezes and meager updates over the years have resulted in current payments rates that are insufficient. In the current economic environment of high inflation, this is even more true. We find it unthinkable that Congress is considering Medicare payment cuts for critical care and other physician services.”

Read the letter for details on critical care physician concerns about the proposed payment cuts.

ABOUT THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS
Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 56,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves.

For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/madeforthismoment. Like ASA on Facebook and follow ASALifeline on Twitter.

ABOUT THE SOCIETY OF CRITICAL CARE ANESTHESIOLOGISTS
The Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists is dedicated to the support and development of anesthesiologists who care for critically ill patients of all types. SOCCA fosters the knowledge and practice of critical care medicine by anesthesiologists through education, research, advocacy, and community.

For more information about SOCCA, please visit www.socca.org.

ABOUT THE SOCIETY OF CRITICAL CARE MEDICINE
The Society of Critical Care Medicine is the largest nonprofit medical organization dedicated to promoting excellence and consistency in the practice of critical care. With members in more than 100 countries, SCCM is the only organization that represents all professional components of the critical care team. The Society offers a variety of activities that ensure excellence in patient care, education, research, and advocacy. SCCM's mission is to secure the highest-quality care for all critically ill and injured patients.

For more information about SCCM, please visit the Society of Critical Care online at www.SCCM.ORG.
 

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Years of monarch research shows how adding habitat will help conservation

Peer-Reviewed Publication

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: PLANTING MILKWEED AND OTHER WILDFLOWERS IS ESSENTIAL TO SUPPORT POPULATION GROWTH FOR MONARCH BUTTERFLIES. A RECENTLY PUBLISHED JOURNAL ARTICLE FOCUSED ON THE PLACEMENT OF NEW MONARCH HABITAT PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF 20 IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH STUDIES. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY JACQUELINE POHL.

AMES, Iowa – When the Iowa Monarch Conservation Consortium was formed seven years ago, Iowa State University researchers faced two big questions about reestablishing the milkweed and other wildflowers needed for the iconic butterfly’s survival: How can habitat be restored and where should it be located? 

The “how” of restoring habitat is outlined in the consortium’s guidelines for planting prairie. “Where” is the subject of a new peer-reviewed journal article that provides an overview of 20 ISU studies, as well as work by other monarch researchers. The paper, published in Bioscience earlier this month, synthesizes years of research that includes field observations, laboratory experiments and simulation modeling. The findings are largely optimistic.

Mobility helps

Establishing new habitat at the rates called for in Iowa’s conservation plan would increase the size of the monarch population by 10-25% per generation, depending on differing scenarios for pesticide use and the amount and location of habitat creation, researchers found.

“Basically, we’ve concluded that planting habitat anywhere you can in the agricultural landscapes of the Upper Midwest will support growth of the monarch’s breeding generations, even if some of that habitat is near crop fields treated with insecticides,” said Steven Bradbury, professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State.

The higher range of estimated population growth assumes the use of integrated pest management practices and applying insecticides only when pests are likely to cause economically significant crop damage, Bradbury said. 

Establishing habitat next to crop fields where insecticides are used is expected to produce more monarchs than if prairie restoration is limited to locations set away from fields. A 100-125 feet buffer between treated fields and habitat patches would eliminate swaths of conservable land, Bradbury said – up to 80% of the non-crop land available in Story County, for instance. Forgoing that much space would make it difficult to add the 1.3-1.6 billion new milkweed stems needed in the Upper Midwest to support a sustainable monarch population. 

Insecticide spray drift from treated crops can pose risks to monarch caterpillars, which live exclusively on milkweed plants. However, the impact on the overall population is mitigated because females are highly mobile within their summer breeding grounds, Bradbury said.

“The females move around the landscape a lot. They don’t put all their eggs in one basket,” he said. 

While some portion of monarchs downwind from treated fields might have high rates of mortality, other eggs are laid in habitat patches that aren’t exposed to insecticides, Bradbury said. And the milkweed plants near treated fields can still support the next generation of adults.

Using radio transmitters to track female monarchs gave researchers better insight into their nonmigratory flight patterns. Monarchs ride wind currents to travel up to dozens of miles a day when migrating to and from the mountainous oyamel fir forests in Mexico, where they spend the winter. But breeding females also fly between patches of habitat when not migrating, in flights that can exceed a mile, researchers found. 

“They’re not migrating when they take these large flight steps, but they seem to turn on a behavior like migration,” Bradbury said. “The general notion was breeding females were moving around a lot to lay their eggs, but there hadn’t been any empirical studies that quantified their non-migratory movement patterns.”

That mobility is part of the reason modeling shows that monarch numbers will still increase if added habitat is fragmented. However, research suggests new plots of habitat of at least 6.2 acres that are situated closely, within 160 to 330 feet of each other, would offer maximal support

What’s ahead

Research and outreach are ongoing for the consortium, a diverse partnership of more than 45 organizations that includes Iowa State, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, federal agencies, agriculture and conservation associations, and agribusiness and utility companies. But now is a good time to summarize the group’s research because it’s reached a natural point to pull the best available information together, Bradbury said. 

“Sometimes in a novel there is a series of chapters that comprise part 1. Our analogy is that we’ve reached the end of part 1,” he said.

There’s also a practical consideration, he said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reconsider in 2024 if the monarch should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, and fact-finding for the decision likely will begin in 2023. It’s an ideal time to share an overview of new monarch research. 

Tasks ahead for researchers include collecting additional field data on egg-laying patterns and integrating ISU’s regional modeling with continental-level models to predict how habitat reestablished in the Upper Midwest will impact the size of the overwintering population in Mexico.

Research methods used by the Iowa State team also could be replicated in other areas where breeding monarchs reside in the summer. Though about half of the population that migrates to Mexico come from the Upper Midwest, monarchs’ other breeding destinations, such as New England and southern Ontario, have different climates and landscapes. 

The interdisciplinary and multilayered research doesn’t just benefit monarchs. It has offered numerous opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to work on projects with a wide variety of stakeholders, Bradbury said.

“That’s a strength for a researcher. Working with landowners can help refine research questions and ensure results that help advance useful conservation practices,” he said.  

The collaborative nature of the consortium also serves as a blueprint for the co-existence of conservation and agricultural production in Iowa, Bradbury said.  

“Conserving the monarch is common ground that brings people together, and those are relationships we can use in addressing other challenges we face,” he said. 

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JOURNAL

BioScience

DOI

10.1093/biosci/biac094 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Monarch Butterfly Ecology, Behavior, and Vulnerabilities in North Central United States Agricultural Landscapes

Comet impacts could bring ingredients for life to Europa’s ocean

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

 

IMAGE: A COMPUTER-GENERATED SIMULATION OF THE POST-IMPACT MELT CHAMBER OF MANANNAN CRATER, AN IMPACT CRATER ON EUROPA. THE SIMULATION SHOWS THE MELT WATER SINKING TO THE OCEAN WITHIN SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS AFTER IMPACT. CARNAHAN ET AL. view more 

CREDIT: CARNAHAN ET AL.

Comet strikes on Jupiter’s moon Europa could help transport critical ingredients for life found on the moon’s surface to its hidden ocean of liquid water — even if the impacts don’t punch completely through the moon’s icy shell.  

The discovery comes from a study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, where researchers developed a computer model to observe what happens after a comet or asteroid strikes the ice shell, which is estimated to be tens of kilometers thick.        

The model shows that if an impact can make it at least halfway through the moon’s ice shell, the heated meltwater it generates will sink through the rest of the ice, bringing oxidants — a class of chemicals required for life — from the surface to the ocean, where they could help sustain any potential life in the sheltered waters.  

The researchers compared the steady sinking of the massive melt chamber to a foundering ship.  

“Once you get enough water, you’re just going to sink,” said lead author and doctoral student Evan Carnahan. “It’s like the Titanic times 10.”  

Scientists have proposed impacts as a means to transport oxidants on Europa, but they assumed the strikes would have to break through the ice. This study is important because it suggests that a much larger range of impacts can do the job, said co-author Marc Hesse, a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences Department of Geological Sciences.   

“This increases the probability that you would have the necessary chemical ingredients for life,” said Hesse, who is also a faculty member at the UT Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.  

Whether oxidants can get from where they naturally form on Europa’s surface to the ocean is one of the biggest questions in planetary science. One of the goals of NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to the icy moon is to collect data that can help narrow down answers.  

For now, comet and asteroid impacts are among the most plausible mechanisms. Scientists have spotted dozens of craters on Europa’s surface, many with a distinct rippled appearance that suggests frozen meltwater and post-impact motion beneath the crater.  

This study models the crater environment after impact — investigating how meltwater travels through ice and its capacity for transporting oxidants. It builds on a previous study by co-author Rónadh Cox, a professor at Williams College, that modeled impacts breaking through Europa’s ice.  

The study found that if an impact reaches the ice shell’s midpoint, over 40% of the meltwater will make it to the ocean. The volume of melt water generated can be significant. For example, this study showed that a half-mile-wide comet that reaches the ice shell’s midpoint would melt enough water to fill Oregon’s Crater Lake. 

Other models describing meltwater on Europa often place it near the surface of the moon for long periods, where it could potentially contribute to icy formations called “chaos terrain.” But this study’s results complicate this idea, with the heavy weight of the meltwater causing it to sink rather than stay in place.  

“We’re cautioning against the idea that you could maintain very large volumes of melt in the shallow subsurface without it sinking,” Carnahan said.  

Like Europa, Saturn’s moon Titan may also hold an ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell. Rosaly Lopes, the directorate scientist for the Planetary Science Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said that this model can help scientists understand the role impacts might have on other icy worlds.    

“In the case of Titan, this is very important because Titan has a thick ice crust — thicker than Europa’s,” she said. “We’re really interested in the application of this study.” 

Carnahan began the research during an internship at NASA JPL, working with co-author Steven Vance and completed it working with Hesse while earning his master’s degree. He is now a doctoral student at the UT Cockrell School of Engineering.   

The UT Center for Planetary Systems Habitability, the Texas Space Grant Consortium Fellowship and NASA funded the research.  

An artist's concept of a comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter's moon Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

CREDIT

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Tyre, a large impact crater on Europa.

CREDIT

NASA/JPL/DLR

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JOURNAL

Geophysical Research Letters

ARTICLE TITLE

Surface-To-Ocean Exchange by the Sinking of Impact Generated Melt Chambers on Europa

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Dec-2022