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International audience ; Concern about the impact of sound on marine mammals has increased over the last decade, causing governments to take a more rigorous look at the potential impact of activities that introduce sound into the ocean. Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) can be prepared using differing analysis methods to estimate the impact on marine mammals. To assess consistency in assessment methods, differences in the base assumptions were investigated; in particular, differences that arise between assumptions of dynamic marine mammals (animat method) and static distributions of marine mammals (static distribution method). Using several ocean environment scenarios and species, it is demonstrated that differences consistently arise between the two methods. The static distribution method underestimates the number of behavioral harassments compared with the animat method. Repeating many simulations with the animat method provides a robust risk assessment, provides a measure of variability, and allows the probability of "spurious events" to be estimated.

In an effort to combat growing demands on players, athlete monitoring has become a central component of professional sport. Despite the introduction of new technologies for athlete monitoring, little is understood about the practices employed in professional rugby clubs. A questionnaire was circulated amongst conditioning staff across the 12 Premiership rugby clubs to capture the methods used, relative importance, perceived effectiveness and barriers to the use of multiple different athlete monitoring measurements. Previous injury, Global Positioning System (GPS) metrics, collision counts and age were deemed the most important risk factors for managing future injury risk. A wide range of GPS metrics are collected across clubs with high-speed running (12/12 clubs), distance in speed zones (12/12 clubs) and total distance (11/12 clubs) the most commonly used. Of the metrics collected, high-speed running was deemed the most important for managing future injury risk (5/12 clubs); however, there was considerable variation between clubs as to the exact definition of high-speed running, with both absolute and relative measures utilised. While the use of such monitoring tools is undertaken to improve athlete welfare by minimising injury risk, this study demonstrates the significant heterogeneity of systems and methods used by clubs for GPS capture. This study therefore questions whether more needs to be done to align practices within the sport to improve athlete welfare.

This article reviews tendon and ligament injury incidence and severity within elite rugby union and rugby league. Furthermore, it discusses the biological makeup of tendons and ligaments and how genetic variation may influence this and predisposition to injury. Elite rugby has one of the highest reported injury incidences of any professional sport. This is likely due to a combination of well-established injury surveillance systems and the characteristics of the game, whereby high-impact body contact frequently occurs, in addition to the high intensity, multispeed and multidirectional nature of play. Some of the most severe of all these injuries are tendon and ligament/joint (non-bone), and therefore, potentially the most debilitating to a player and playing squad across a season or World Cup competition. The aetiology of these injuries is highly multi-factorial, with a growing body of evidence suggesting that some of the inter-individual variability in injury susceptibility may be due to genetic variation. However, little effort has been devoted to the study of genetic injury traits within rugby athletes. Due to a growing understanding of the molecular characteristics underpinning the aetiology of injury, investigating genetic variation within elite rugby is a viable and worthy proposition. Therefore, we propose several single nucleotide polymorphisms within candidate genes of interest; COL1A1, COL3A1, COL5A1, MIR608, MMP3, TIMP2, VEGFA, NID1 and COLGALT1 warrant further study within elite rugby and other invasion sports.

The Team Sports Risk Exposure Framework (TS-REF) was developed in July 2020 by experts in sports medicine, virology, sports science and public health to facilitate the safe return of sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. The TS-REF was developed at the time when the outdoor transmission risk of SARS-CoV-2 during sport was unknown. The TS-REF has been adopted by Public Health England and the UK Government (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), for use within both elite and community sports, to both determine the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission during specific sporting activities (eg, rugby tackle), and to identify and isolate increased risk contacts during sport. The TS-REF classified increased risk contacts as player-to-player interactions 'within 1 m, directly face to face, for 3 or more seconds'.