Publications by authors named "Amanda Bradford"

To address our climate emergency, "we must rapidly, radically reshape society"-Johnson & Wilkinson, All We Can Save. In science, reshaping requires formidable technical (cloud, coding, reproducibility) and cultural shifts (mindsets, hybrid collaboration, inclusion). We are a group of cross-government and academic scientists that are exploring better ways of working and not being too entrenched in our bureaucracies to do better science, support colleagues, and change the culture at our organizations.

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For the 40 years after the end of commercial whaling in 1976, humpback whale populations in the North Pacific Ocean exhibited a prolonged period of recovery. Using mark-recapture methods on the largest individual photo-identification dataset ever assembled for a cetacean, we estimated annual ocean-basin-wide abundance for the species from 2002 through 2021. Trends in annual estimates describe strong post-whaling era population recovery from 16 875 (± 5955) in 2002 to a peak abundance estimate of 33 488 (± 4455) in 2012.

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Article Synopsis
  • Understanding the health status of long-lived species is crucial for their management, but traditional monitoring methods are slow, often taking decades to reveal changes in populations.
  • A new approach using Unoccupied Aerial Systems (UAS) photogrammetry was tested to assess the age structure of bottlenose dolphins, offering a potential early warning system for population decline.
  • Results showed that UAS estimates can accurately determine the total body length of dolphins and classify age groups effectively, with a high percentage of individuals being correctly allocated to their age classes within two years.
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Article Synopsis
  • * The dataset covers 13 regions and includes data on 27,956 unique humpback whales from 2001-2021, with an impressive identification accuracy of 97-99% using advanced machine learning.
  • * This resource aims to facilitate collaborative research on humpback whales and their habitats, especially as the ocean undergoes significant ecological changes.
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On January 20, 2020, the CDC reported its first case of the novel coronavirus in the United States. Almost a year and a half after the first COVID-19 vaccine was given in the U.S.

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Western North Pacific gray whales (WGWs), once considered extinct, are critically endangered with unknown migratory routes and reproductive areas. We attached satellite-monitored tags to seven WGWs on their primary feeding ground off Sakhalin Island, Russia, three of which subsequently migrated to regions occupied by non-endangered eastern gray whales (EGWs). A female with the longest-lasting tag visited all three major EGW reproductive areas off Baja California, Mexico, before returning to Sakhalin Island the following spring.

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Background: Utilization indices exist to measure quantity of prenatal care, but currently there is no published instrument to assess quality of prenatal care. The purpose of this study was to develop and test a new instrument, the Quality of Prenatal Care Questionnaire (QPCQ).

Methods: Data for this instrument development study were collected in five Canadian cities.

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For biological populations that form aggregations (or clusters) of individuals, cluster size is an important parameter in line-transect abundance estimation and should be accurately measured. Cluster size in cetaceans has traditionally been represented as the total number of individuals in a group, but group size may be underestimated if group members are spatially diffuse. Groups of false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) can comprise numerous subgroups that are dispersed over tens of kilometers, leading to a spatial mismatch between a detected group and the theoretical framework of line-transect analysis.

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Upregulation of utrophin in muscle is currently being examined as a potential therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients. In this context, we generated transgenic mice harboring a 1.3 kb human utrophin A promoter fragment driving expression of the lacZ gene.

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A sample of 16 male and 30 female undergraduates completed the Greer and Francis Scale of Rejection of Christianity. The data support the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the scale for this sample.

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