Mount Allison University

Islands are important components of many coastal areas around the world; however, by virtue of their geographical isolation, the state of these ecosystems is often poorly known. To address the knowledge gap for the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing (RS), and machine learning (ML) were used to examine the status of nearly 4000 islands. We classified islands topographically and determined, based on 1 m resolution LiDAR, that approximately 70% are <2 m average elevation and highly vulnerable to partial or complete flooding under near-term regimes of sea level rise and storm surge potential. Vegetation cover was strongly related to topographic class, with higher, more steeply-sided islands having more tree cover and less sand, rock, and wetland. Climatic changes were most pronounced in the form of sea surface temperature (SST) warming, with August changes (+0.063 °C yr^-1) being 6.3× higher than the global mean background rate, particularly affecting the Gulf of St. Lawrence subregion. Human activity, in the form of marine traffic, is a pervasive stress. To integrate all these factors, a random forest ML model was trained using tree mortality from forest inventory records as the environmental response, and the predictions were used to define a region-wide Ecosystem Stress Index (ESI). These findings demonstrate the kinds of insights geospatial data and ML can provide, and offer tools for improving our understanding of coastal island vulnerability.

Honest communication between patients and doctors is essential for providing quality healthcare. The present study tested a sample of 158 younger and 149 older adults and assessed how often they lied to their doctor about their health behaviors (exercise, food/diet, alcohol use, illicit drug use, cigarette smoking). We also assessed perceptions of two communication strategies where patients reported their health concerns verbally to their doctor (direct communication) or by writing down their concerns before seeing the doctor (indirect communication). Lying to one’s doctor was common across adults, but younger adults were more likely to lie about drug use and cigarette smoking compared with older adults. Younger adults also showed a stronger preference for indirect communication and reported that this communication method would make them more honest with their doctor during a routine check-up. These results offer insight into enhancing honesty between patients and doctors.

There is a lack of biomarkers that can be used to predict fresh and frozen-thawed sperm quality for the commercially important blue catfish, Ictalurus furcatus. Sperm membranes are composed of various fatty acids (FAs) that have been linked to reproductive success across other animal and fish taxa, making it a potential biomarker. The objectives of this study were to (i) compare sperm FA percentages between fresh and cryopreserved male groups; and (ii) use sperm kinematics of fresh and cryopreserved males to create "good" (i.e. fast swimming sperm kinematics) and "bad" (i.e. slow swimming sperm kinematics) quality groups, then compare FA percentages of the groups to pinpoint physiological biomarkers of fresh and frozen-thawed sperm quality and cryotolerance. We found significant differences between fresh and cryopreserved sperm where fresh sperm had significantly higher ratios of n-3:n-6 and EPA:ARA as well as n-3 PUFAs and MUFAs, while cryopreserved sperm had higher concentrations of saturates. Cryopreserved sperm from good and bad males also had differences, such as a significantly higher concentration of saturates in good males and significantly higher concentrations of MUFAs, n-6 PUFAs, n-3 PUFAs, and total PUFAs in bad males. Lastly, low levels of MUFAs and n-6 PUFAs in fresh sperm resulted in higher post-thaw sperm kinematics. This knowledge can now be used to create additional biomarkers of sperm quality and to formulate the FA profile of catfish diets to improve sperm quality, thereby, improving their ability to handle the stressors of the cryopreservation process.