Suchergebnisse

Context -- The Ecosystem Concept -- Earth's Climate System -- Geology and Soils -- Mechanisms -- Terrestrial Water and Energy Balance -- Carbon Input to Terrestrial Ecosystems -- Terrestrial Production Processes -- Terrestrial Decomposition -- Terrestrial Plant Nutrient Use -- Terrestrial Nutrient Cycling -- Aquatic Carbon and Nutrient Cycling -- Trophic Dynamics -- Community Effects on Ecosystem Processes -- Patterns -- Temporal Dynamics -- Landscape Heterogeneity and Ecosystem Dynamics -- Integration -- Global Biogeochemical Cycles -- Managing and Sustaining Ecosystems.

Purpose: To examine how interpersonal factors are associated with family, peer, and partner social support among urban female adolescents in sexual relationships. Design: Secondary data analysis of cross-sectional data. Setting: Two urban health clinics and community sites in Baltimore, Maryland. Participants: One hundred sixteen female adolescents (ages 16-19) with 131 heterosexual relationships from the Perceived Risk of Sexually Transmitted Diseases cohort. Measures: Interpersonal factors included parental monitoring, friend–partner connectedness, and feelings of intimacy for partner. Social support was measured using the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support with family, peer, and partner subdomains. Analysis: Multivariable linear regression models using baseline data and accounting for clustering of partners. Results: Adolescents perceived high levels of family, peer, and partner support, with the greatest coming from partners (range: 1-5; family mean: 4.0 [95% confidence interval, CI: 3.83-4.18]; peer mean: 4.2 [95% CI: 4.05-4.33]; partner mean: 4.5 [95% CI: 4.36-4.60]). Parental monitoring and friend–partner connectedness were significantly associated with greater family ( b = 0.11, standard error [SE] = 0.03, P = 0.001; b = 0.15, SE = 0.06, P = .02) and peer support ( b = 0.06, SE = 0.02, P = .01; b = 0.29, SE = 0.07, P < .001). Feelings of intimacy for partner was significantly associated with greater partner support ( b = 0.08, SE = 0.03, P = .02). Conclusion: Feeling connected to one's social network and having a connected network is an important contribution to social support for urban female adolescents in sexual relationships. Future research targeting interpersonal factors is warranted, as it may result in increased social support and promote positive sexual health behaviors in an urban female adolescent population.

PURPOSE: Adolescents with opioid use disorder are less likely than adults to receive medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), yet we know little about facilities that provide adolescents addiction treatment. We sought to describe adolescent-serving addiction treatment facilities in the US and examine associations between facility characteristics and offering MOUD, leading to informed recommendations to improve treatment access. METHODS: This cross-sectional study used the 2017 National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services. Facilities were classified by whether they offered a specialized adolescent program. Covariates included facility ownership, hospital affiliation, insurance/payments, government grants, accreditation/licensure, location, levels of care, and provision of MOUD. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression compared adolescent-serving versus adult-focused facilities, and identified characteristics associated with offering maintenance MOUD. RESULTS: Among 13,585 addiction treatment facilities in the US, 3,537 (26.0%) offered adolescent programs. Adolescent-serving facilities were half as likely to offer maintenance MOUD as adult-focused facilities (odds ratio, 0.53; 95% confidence interval, 0.49–0.58), which was offered at 23.1% (816) of adolescent-serving versus 35.9% (3,612) of adult-focused facilities. Among adolescent-serving facilities, characteristics associated with increased unadjusted odds of offering maintenance MOUD were non-profit status, hospital affiliation, accepting insurance (particularly, private insurance), accreditation, Northeastern location, or offering inpatient services. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: The one-quarter of US addiction treatment facilities that serve adolescents are half as likely to provide MOUD as adult-focused facilities, which may explain why adolescents are less likely than adults to receive MOUD. Strategies to increase adolescent access to MOUD may consider insurance reforms/incentives, facility accreditation, and geographically-targeted funding.

Innovative financial instruments are being created to reward conservation on private, working lands. Major design challenges remain, however, to make investments in biodiversity and ecosystem services economically attractive and commonplace. From a business perspective, three key financial barriers for advancing conservation land uses must frequently be addressed: high up-front costs, long time periods with no revenue, and high project risk due to long time horizons and uncertainty. We explored ways of overcoming these barriers on grazing lands in Hawaii by realizing a suite of timber and conservation revenue streams associated with their (partial) reforestation. We calculated the financial implications of alternative strategies, focusing on Acacia koa ("koa") forestry because of its high conservation and economic potential. Koa's timber value alone creates a viable investment (mean net present value = $453/acre), but its long time horizon and poor initial cash flow pose formidable challenges for landowners. At present, subsidy payments from a government conservation program targeting benefits for biodiversity, water quality, and soil erosion have the greatest potential to move landowners beyond the tipping point in favor of investments in koa forestry, particularly when combined with future timber harvest (mean net present value = $1,661/acre). Creating financial mechanisms to capture diverse ecosystem service values through time will broaden opportunities for conservation land uses. Governments, nongovernmental organizations, and private investors have roles to play in catalyzing this transition by developing new revenue streams that can reach a broad spectrum of landowners.

The interactions between environmental change and human societies have a long, complex history spanning many millennia, but these have changed fundamentally in the last century. Human activities are now so pervasive and profound that they are altering the Earth in ways which threaten the very life support system upon which humans depend. This book describes what is known about the Earth System and the impact of changes caused by humans. It considers the consequences of these changes with respect to the stability of the Earth System and the well-being of humankind, as well as exploring future paths towards Earth System science in support of global sustainability. TOC:An Integrated Earth System.- Planetary Machinery: The Dynamics of the Earth System Prior to Significant Human Influence.- The Anthropocene Era: How Humans are Changing the Earth System.- Reverberations of Change: The Responses of the Earth System to Human Activities.- Living with Global Change: Consequences of Changes in the Earth System for Human Well-Being.- Towards Earth System Science and Global Sustainability

A uniquely collaborative analysis of human adaptation to the Polynesian islands, told through oral histories, biophysical evidence, and historical records Humans began to settle the area we know as Polynesia between 3,000 and 800 years ago, bringing with them material culture, including plants and animals, and ideas about societal organization, and then adapting to the specific biophysical features of the islands they discovered. The authors of this book analyze the formation of their human-environment systems using oral histories, biophysical evidence, and historical records, arguing that the Polynesian islands can serve as useful models for how human societies in general interact with their environments. The islands' clearly defined (and relatively isolated) environments, comparatively recent discovery by humans, and innovative and dynamic societies allow for insights not available when studying other cultures. Kamana Beamer, Te Maire Tau, and Peter Vitousek have collaborated with a dozen other scholars, many of them Polynesian, to show how these cultures adapted to novel environments in the past and how we can draw insights for global sustainability today