Search Results (10,977)

Pinyon–juniper (PJ) woodlands, one of the most extensive mature and old-growth woodland types in the Western United States, provide critical ecological, cultural, and economic benefits but face increasing threats from climate change, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and pests. We developed the PJ Woodland Climate Adaptation Management Menu, a decision support tool designed to guide adaptive, climate-informed management of PJ ecosystems, particularly within the Colorado Plateau ecoregion. The menu was created through an iterative, collaborative process involving literature review, integration of strategies from existing adaptation frameworks, and extensive input from scientists, land managers, and community partners during workshops and focus groups. The menu links specific, evidence-based approaches to each of six broad strategies, including soliciting community input, mitigating disturbance, enhancing and maintaining biodiversity, conserving ecotones, timing actions for optimal outcomes, and accepting climate-driven changes when appropriate. It is intended for use with the Adaptation Workbook to help managers connect local goals and climate vulnerabilities to tailored management tactics. Hypothetical scenarios demonstrate the menu’s application to contrasting PJ woodland conditions, from die-off events to old-growth maintenance. Lessons learned during development underscore the value of early stakeholder engagement, cross-sector collaboration, and balancing diverse ecological objectives. This menu offers a flexible, transferable framework to strengthen climate resilience in PJ woodlands and serves as a model that could improve adaptation planning in other dryland forest ecosystems. Full article

The rising market penetration of new energy vehicles (NEVs) is transforming urban traffic into a heterogeneous mix of battery electric (BEVs), hybrid electric (HEVs), and conventional fuel vehicles (FVs). For analytical brevity, traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) are hereafter referred to as ‘fuel vehicles (FVs)’ in the discussion of New Energy Vehicle (NEV) networks. This research investigates the efficacy of centralized coordination for NEVs within a localized region, as opposed to individualized speed control, in enhancing the mitigation of traffic congestion. Evaluating traffic efficiency and decarbonization strategies in such settings often requires extensive random sampling and Monte Carlo simulations over a large set of parameter combinations. However, conventional microscopic traffic simulators (e.g., SUMO), which rely on fine-grained modeling of vehicle dynamics and signal control, incur prohibitive computational time when scaled to large networks and numerous experimental scenarios. In this study, battery electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles are designed as density-aware vehicles, whose movement speed is adaptively adjusted according to the regional traffic density in their vicinity and the control parameter β. In contrast, fuel vehicles adopt a stochastic movement speed and, together with other vehicle types, exhibit either movement or stoppage in the lattice environment. This density-driven speed-adaptive control and lattice arbitration mechanism is intended to reproduce, in a simplified yet extensible manner, changes in mobility and traffic-flow stability under high-density traffic conditions. The simulation results indicate that, under the same Manhattan road network and vehicle-density conditions, tuning the β parameter of new energy vehicles to reduce their movement speed in high-density areas and to mitigate abrupt position changes can suppress traffic-flow oscillations, delay the onset of the congestion phase transition, and promote spatial equilibrium of traffic flow. Meanwhile, this study develops simplified energy-consumption and carbon emission models for battery electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, and fuel vehicles, demonstrating that incorporating a speed-adaptive density strategy into mixed traffic flow not only helps alleviate abnormal congestion but also reduces potential energy use and carbon emissions caused by congestion and stop-and-go behavior. From a sensing and practical perspective, the proposed framework assumes that future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) can estimate vehicle states and local traffic density through GNSS–IMU multi-sensor fusion and V2X communications, indicating methodological consistency between the proposed model and real-world CAV sensing capabilities and making it a suitable and effective experimental platform for investigating the relationships among new energy vehicle penetration, density-control strategies, and carbon footprint. Full article

Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) composed of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a promising solution for emergency wireless communications when terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. However, ensuring reliable Quality of Service (QoS) in these highly dynamic networks remains challenging due to topology changes, varying propagation conditions, and congestion. This work proposes a lightweight machine learning-based QoS optimization framework for multi-UAV emergency communications that combines realistic mobility modeling, empirical channel measurements, and adaptive traffic prioritization. UAV mobility patterns are generated with ArduSim, while LoS/NLoS propagation models are derived from real UAV flight experiments and integrated into ns-3. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms—including Decision Trees, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, k-NN, Gradient Boosting, and CatBoost—are trained using four input features derived from the network state: ${\mathrm{CBR}}_{\mathrm{src}}$, ${\mathrm{QP}}_{\mathrm{src}}$, ${\mathrm{CBR}}_{\mathrm{dst}}$, and ${\mathrm{QP}}_{\mathrm{dst}}$. Simulation results show that the proposed AI SMOTE EMERGENCY scheme, based on CatBoost, improves the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) by approximately 43% over the No-QoS baseline, achieving 89–93% delivery across all four application ports. Compared with EDCA, the proposed scheme maintains reliable delivery for all services, increases emergency throughput by 34–36%, and reduces end-to-end delay by about 70%. In addition, the higher delivery reliability translates into clear communication energy benefits, reducing energy waste across all evaluated topologies when compared with the No-QoS baseline. The inference time remains below 0.002 s, supporting real-time QoS adaptation in resource-constrained UAV networks. Full article

The paper explores the implementation of inclusive, student-centered pedagogies in an internationally co-taught EAP course. Designed within the Erasmus+ W.I.D.E. framework, the course brought together students from Italy and Israel to collaboratively work on academic conference presentations delivered in English as a lingua franca. The study employs an Action Research and Case Study approach, allowing iterative cycles of planning, implementation, observation, and reflection to inform pedagogical decisions. This embraces three intersecting priorities in contemporary higher education: preparing students for global academic participation, fostering inclusive and supportive learning environments, and cultivating intercultural competence in digitally mediated settings. More specifically, drawing on a project-based teaching framework, the study examines how students are socialized into academic discourse through delivering presentations, engaging in intercultural dialogue, and developing cross-curricular soft skills. Our findings suggest that project-based work in small multicultural teams can support both autonomy and cooperation, while contributing to the development of critical thinking, mediation and confidence in public speaking, essential for participation in international academic communities. The findings also point to the potential role of responsive and compassionate pedagogy in digital collaboration. The study offers a practice-informed model that may be adaptable to similar contexts for bridging EAP and international research practices, highlighting implications for intercultural academic communication, virtual mobility, and inclusive language education. Full article

Background/Objectives: Effective information seeking is essential for new graduate nurses’ adaptation to the workplace. The objective of this study was to identify how nurse managers and senior nurses support new graduate nurses’ information seeking and the expectations underlying such support. Methods: Nurse managers and senior nurses from Japanese hospitals participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis by coding meaningful units, grouping similar codes into subcategories, and organizing them into broader categories. Ethical approval was obtained from the research ethics committee of the first author’s institution, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants. Results: Participants included twelve nurse managers from five hospitals and fourteen senior nurses from three hospitals. The nurse managers had an average of 7.4 years of supervisory experience, and the senior nurses had an average of 14.2 years of clinical experience. Participants expected new graduate nurses to demonstrate appropriate attitudes toward seeking information, engage in proactive communication to express their needs or uncertainties, take initiative in seeking and obtaining information, and build relationships with senior nurses that would facilitate information seeking. To support these expectations, participants adopted approaches that encouraged information seeking, proactively provided necessary information, and promoted information sharing among peers. Nurse managers also sought to create a work environment in which all staff members collectively nurtured new graduate nurses. Conclusions: To facilitate information seeking among new graduate nurses, nurse managers and senior nurses need to foster a supportive work environment. They also need to recognize the information content, sources, tactics, and timing appropriate for new graduate nurses. Full article

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a medically centered, interdisciplinary treatment model on adaptive behavior in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The Cortica model involves a comprehensive program including behavioral and developmental therapies, overseen by a neurodevelopmental physician. Here, we investigated how adaptive behaviors change over time during care at Cortica. Methods: We analyzed changes in the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales over the course of Cortica care compared to a community sample comprising longitudinal data from the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR). Results: Using propensity score weights to match cohorts based on baseline functioning, multilevel growth curve models showed significant Cohort × Time interactions for the Adaptive Behavior Composite (ABC) score and all subscale scores, indicating increased growth in adaptive behavior skills for children in the Cortica cohort relative to NDAR. Conclusions: Results of this study highlight the importance of using adaptive behaviors as a primary outcome in clinical research studies and suggest that a personalized, multidisciplinary approach to intervention can result in improved adaptive behavior skills over time. Full article

Background: Governments increasingly seek whole-system, public-health approaches to prevent serious youth violence. However, there is limited empirical evidence on how such approaches are implemented and sustained in complex, post-conflict settings characterised by coercive control, political instability, and fragmented system ownership. Aim: This study examines the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime (EPPOC) in Northern Ireland as a system-level implementation architecture for addressing serious youth violence, with a focus on how coordinated action was enabled, constrained, and adapted over time. Methods: We conducted an embedded qualitative case study of EPPOC using systematic analysis of programme documentation, independent evaluations, oversight reports, and population-level data spanning nine years of delivery. Implementation science frameworks (ERIC, Proctor’s implementation outcomes, and CFIR) were applied retrospectively as analytic lenses to examine implementation strategies, outcomes, and contextual determinants. Results: EPPOC demonstrated strong implementation outcomes in acceptability and adoption across statutory and community sectors, supported by cross-government governance, trauma-informed workforce development, and shared learning systems. Penetration and sustainability were more variable and constrained by political instability, short-term funding cycles, uneven departmental ownership, and coercive community conditions. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the most transferable element of EPPOC is not individual interventions but the implementation architecture that enabled coordinated, trauma-responsive action across government in a highly complex environment. This architecture represents a potentially replicable design pattern for jurisdictions seeking to address serious youth violence where traditional programme models struggle to operate. Full article

Adolescents and young people (AYP) experience a disproportionate burden of both mental health conditions and HIV, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)-nations classified by the World Bank as having lower or middle economies. Mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and substance use increase HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus that attacks the human immune system and leads to various illnesses when untreated) risk, and negatively affect treatment adherence and outcomes. However, mental health remains insufficiently integrated into HIV research and programming. Evidence on how mental health services are operationally integrated into HIV prevention and treatment for this population is limited and fragmented. This scoping review mapped existing evidence on the integration of mental health services into HIV treatment programs for AYP in LMICs, guided by PRISMA-ScR (a guideline used for reporting scoping reviews in research) and the Person–Concept–Context framework, a framework used to define specific research question in research. In this case, the population was adolescents and young people (10–24 years) receiving HIV prevention or treatment services, the concept referring to the integration of mental health interventions such as screening, assessment and counseling within HIV services, and the context focused on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus and PsycINFO databases were searched for studies published between 2014 and 2024. Eligible studies reported mental health screening, assessment, treatment, or referral within HIV services for AYP in LMICs. Two reviewers independently screened studies, assessed full texts, and extracted data. Of 634 records identified, ten (10) studies met the inclusion criteria. All were conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa and primarily used qualitative or pilot designs. Four integration approaches were identified: routine mental health screening within HIV services, task-shifting to trained lay providers, peer-led and community-based psychosocial support, and culturally adapted, youth-centered psychological interventions. Common barriers included stigma, low mental health literacy, limited training and supervision, staffing constraints, and weak referral systems. Existing evidence is limited, remains exploratory, preliminary, and largely focused on feasibility and implementation experiences, suggesting that integrating mental health services within adolescent HIV care in LMICs may be feasible and acceptable when approaches are contextually adapted and participatory. Full article

Fusobacterium nucleatum (Fn) has emerged as one of the most extensively studied tumor-associated opportunistic pathogens in colorectal cancer (CRC). The central question in Fn–CRC research has shifted from species-level detection or enrichment toward identifying specific lineages with enhanced persistence and tumor-promoting potential under defined host and ecological contexts. Accumulating evidence suggests substantial heterogeneity within Fn at the subspecies and clade levels. Among these, the F. nucleatum subsp. animalis C2 (Fna C2) lineage has been proposed as a candidate high-risk clade with potentially greater adaptability to the gastrointestinal tract and tumor microenvironment. However, current support for Fna C2 is derived mainly from ecological enrichment, comparative genomics, inferred metabolic features, and limited functional observations, while direct clinical and mechanistic validation at the clade level remains limited. Fn has been implicated in CRC progression through multiple interconnected processes, including adhesion and colonization, host signaling activation, inflammatory amplification, immune suppression, and metabolic adaptation. Notably, these pathogenic outputs are unlikely to be uniformly distributed across all Fn lineages, but instead appear to be shaped by the combined influence of bacterial lineage, host molecular context, microbial community structure, and spatial organization within the tumor microenvironment. In this review, we summarize the lineage heterogeneity of Fn, its association with CRC, and the underlying host–pathogen interaction mechanisms. We further discuss implications for high-resolution stratification, risk classification, and clinical translation, emphasizing the need to move from species-level associations toward lineage-resolved and context-aware frameworks. Full article

Pinus cembroides is among the pine species best adapted to arid and semi-arid ecosystems in the Americas, and its potential distribution is projected to expand under climate change. However, the success of this expansion will depend on belowground processes, particularly the role of soil fungal communities, which in subtropical forests are key for nutrient cycling and plant resilience to environmental stress. Yet their vertical stratification and responses to forest management remain poorly understood, especially in semi-arid systems. Here, we characterized fungal communities from mineral soil and litter associated with P. cembroides across a forest management gradient (mature forests, disturbed stands, and pine plantations) at the southern limit of the species’ distribution. We evaluated the influence of climatic, edaphic, vegetation structure, and microbial activity variables (soil moisture, precipitation, pH, tree density, vegetation cover, temperature and extracellular enzyme activity) on fungal community composition. We found strong vertical stratification between litter and mineral soil. When both substrates were analyzed together as an integrated soil profile, forest condition had no significant effect on alpha diversity; however, substrate-specific analyses revealed higher richness in mineral soil of mature forests compared to disturbed and plantation sites, while litter communities showed no significant differences among conditions. Litter communities were characterized by saprotrophic and endophytic fungi, whereas mineral soil communities were enriched in ectomycorrhizal and other root-associated taxa. Distance-based redundancy analysis indicated that fungal community composition was primarily associated with moisture content, precipitation, pH, tree density, and carbon-degrading enzyme activity. These results highlight the importance of substrate differentiation and environmental gradients in shaping fungal communities in semi-arid pine forests, and provide a baseline for understanding how management and climate change influence soil fungal diversity and ecosystem functioning. Full article

The livestock sector underpins food security, employment, and rural livelihoods across the Southern African Development Community (SADC), contributing up to 50% of agricultural GDP and supporting more than 60% of rural households. Yet climate change poses escalating threats through heat stress, declining pasture productivity, water scarcity, and vector-borne diseases that compromise productivity and economic resilience. This review identifies and locates effective climate change mitigation strategies along the livestock value chain, spanning production, processing, transport, and consumption, to promote sustainable, low-emission, and inclusive growth in the SADC region. A broad review of 46 peer-reviewed and institutional sources (2000–2024) was undertaken, focusing on livestock-related mitigation within SADC and comparable agro-ecological systems. Strategies were thematically categorized by value-chain stage and assessed for their emission-reduction and livelihood-enhancement potential. Local strategies include genetic improvement for low-methane and heat-tolerant breeds, adaptive rangeland and feed management, renewable-energy adoption in processing, climate-resilient transport infrastructure, and consumer awareness of low-emission products. Evidence suggests potential GHG-emission reductions of 18–30%, coupled with productivity gains and improved smallholder incomes. Coordinated implementation through the SADC Regional Agricultural Investment Plan (2021–2030) and national policies can transform the livestock sector into a climate-resilient driver of inclusive growth. Further research should quantify the socioeconomic feasibility and scaling potential of these strategies across production systems. Successful integration of climate change mitigation imperatives must be tailored to local biophysical conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil type) and socioeconomic contexts (e.g., market access, cultural practices). Full article

In single-carrier underwater acoustic (UWA) communication systems, sparse multipath channels and long delay spreads pose significant challenges to adaptive equalization, often leading to limited steady-state accuracy and degraded detection performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a data reuse-based ${\ell }_1$-regularized proportionate recursive least-squares algorithm (DR-${\ell }_1$-PRLS) for sparse adaptive equalization. The proposed method incorporates a data reuse (DR) mechanism into the ${\ell }_1$-PRLS framework, enabling multiple equivalent uses of each received–reference sample pair without increasing pilot overhead. Meanwhile, by combining the proportionate update strategy with the ${\ell }_1$ sparsity constraint, the structural information of sparse channels can be more fully exploited, thereby improving parameter estimation accuracy. Numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed method in terms of convergence behavior, tracking capability, computational complexity, and bit error rate (BER), and comparisons are made with LMS, RLS, PRLS, ${\ell }_1$-PRLS, and DR-PRLS algorithms. Simulation results show that, under sparse underwater acoustic channel conditions, DR-${\ell }_1$-PRLS achieves lower steady-state error and better BER performance while maintaining good tracking capability, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness for sparse adaptive equalization in single-carrier underwater acoustic communications. Full article

With growing health awareness and an increasing preference for indoor exercise among the elderly, the demand for community indoor activity spaces is rising in the northern regions of China with cold winters and hot summers. While previous community studies have primarily focused on residential buildings, limited attention has been given to indoor activity spaces for the elderly. Moreover, field measurements expose critical thermal deficiencies in these spaces, where indoor temperatures remain substandard in both winter and summer, particularly falling substantially below the WHO health-based threshold (≥18 °C) in winter. Recognizing that transitional spaces are effective for improving indoor thermal conditions, this study explored their potential to enhance the indoor thermal environment, leading to targeted retrofitting schemes. The results showed that although additional transitional spaces effectively enhance the thermal performance, the strategies for winter and summer often conflict. Specifically, enclosed transitional spaces are effective for winter insulation but are prone to overheating in summer, whereas semi-outdoor configurations on the south and west facades are beneficial for summer heat prevention. Based on these findings, optimal retrofitting schemes were identified: for Site A, the existing interior corridor is transformed into a semi-outdoor transitional space; for Site B, an Adaptive Façade system is proposed for the south façade. Furthermore, despite the passive benefits, auxiliary HVAC systems remain necessary to maintain temperatures strictly within the comfort range during extreme weather. This study provides a scientific basis for research on transition spaces and offers a reference for retrofitting buildings in similar climatic regions. Full article

To support intelligent maritime applications, space–air–ground–sea integrated networks (SAGSINs) have been introduced in maritime communications to provide wide coverage and reliable network services. In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted SAGSIN architectures, UAVs can flexibly extend coverage and provide on-demand communication and computing support. However, due to the high mobility of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and the limited endurance of UAVs, single-platform deployment strategies struggle to provide both flexibility and scalability in maritime communication networks. To mitigate the service instability caused by satellite orbital dynamics and limited UAV endurance, we propose a Hybrid Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (H-MAPPO)-based joint satellite–UAV deployment scheme for UAV-assisted SAGSIN systems. The proposed method optimizes joint UAV positioning and resource allocation to enhance communication coverage while reducing overall operational cost. By incorporating satellite orbital dynamics and UAV mobility into a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework, adaptive resource scheduling can be achieved under time-varying maritime demands. Simulation results show that the proposed H-MAPPO algorithm achieves superior convergence performance, higher user coverage, and lower total system cost compared with learning-based, random, and heuristic methods while maintaining stable and robust performance under varying user densities and network scales. Full article

Language is social, as it is used by individuals to communicate and exchange ideas in society. Language is also cognitive, as the primary function of language, even before communicating and exchanging ideas, is to think. This article connects the social representations of what bilingualism is in the United States and how transnational youth are talked about in U.S. society with how both of these social representations create cognitive representations (e.g., thoughts, ideas, and beliefs) about transnational youth that result in negative educational policies and practices and shameful psychological and behavioral experiences for these youth. We begin with an ethnosemantic analysis of the word “bilingual” in the U.S. and then use the cognitive linguistic phenomena of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy to explain how bilingualism is cognitively viewed as a “shameful problem” in society for transnational youth. We link linguistic shame, brought on by the social cognitive representations of bilingualism as transnational youth metonymically being incomplete, broken, in disrepair, fractured, unsettled, displaced, lacking fully built linguistic structures, not fully in possession of any language, to the phenomenon of and conceptual metaphor of TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH’S BILINGUALISM IS LINGUISTIC HOMELESSNESS. We conclude by putting forth a new metaphor, TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE ARE MYCELIAL NETWORKS, that rejects the concept of linguistic homelessness by pointing to these youth’s expanding networks of fluid languaging practices, transnational academic skills, and ever adapting identities. Through this new discourse, we advocate for new ways of socially talking about transnational youth and their languaging practices that may lead to different cognitive representations of these students; reorienting bilingualism from a problem to a resource and a right. Full article