Publications by authors named "Bistra Dilkina"

Biodiversity continues to decline despite protected area expansion and global conservation commitments. Biodiversity losses occur in existing protected areas, yet common methods used to select protected areas ignore postimplementation threats that reduce effectiveness. We developed a conservation planning framework that considers the ongoing anthropogenic threats within protected areas when selecting sites and the value of planning for costly threat-mitigating activities (i.

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Wildlife trafficking, whether local or transnational in scope, undermines sustainable development efforts, degrades cultural resources, endangers species, erodes the local and global economy, and facilitates the spread of zoonotic diseases. Wildlife trafficking networks (WTNs) occupy a unique gray space in supply chains-straddling licit and illicit networks, supporting legitimate and criminal workforces, and often demonstrating high resilience in their sourcing flexibility and adaptability. Authorities in different sectors desire, but frequently lack knowledge about how to allocate resources to disrupt illicit wildlife supply networks and prevent negative collateral impacts.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study utilized machine learning to identify and compare risk factors for marijuana use among adolescents in child welfare (CW) and non-child welfare (non-CW) contexts.
  • Data was analyzed from a group of 350 adolescents, focusing on variables like mental health, family support, and peer risk behaviors to establish their influence on marijuana use.
  • The findings revealed differing key risk factors for each group, with peer marijuana use being most significant for CW youth and externalizing behavior for non-CW youth, highlighting the need for tailored clinical assessments.
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Early liver transplantation (LT) for alcohol-associated hepatitis (AH) is the fastest growing indication for LT, but prediction of harmful alcohol use post-LT remains limited. Among 10 ACCELERATE-AH centers, we examined psychosocial evaluations from consecutive LT recipients for AH from 2006 to 2017. A multidisciplinary panel used content analysis to develop a maximal list of psychosocial variables.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The US is facing a drug overdose crisis, with increasing deaths from both opioids and psychostimulants like methamphetamine, particularly impacting adolescents and young adults with high relapse rates after treatment.
  • - A study used machine learning to analyze factors influencing the risk of opioid and psychostimulant use post-treatment, finding significant predictors including individual demographics (age, tobacco use, criminal history) and environmental factors (poverty, population density, neighborhood crime rates).
  • - The research highlights the importance of considering environmental influences in treatment approaches, suggesting that tailored interventions based on severity and surroundings could improve outcomes for individuals with substance use disorders.
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Urban water services, including drinking water supply and wastewater treatment, are highly energy dependent, contributing to the challenges described under the water-energy nexus. Both future climate change and decentralized water system adoptions can potentially influence the energy use of the urban water services. However, the trend and the extent of such influences have not been well understood.

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Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large-scale resource allocation need to be considered. We present a continuous optimization approach in which a decision-maker allocates funding to regional offices.

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Sea level rise in the United States will lead to large scale migration in the future. We propose a framework to examine future climate migration patterns using models of human migration. Our framework requires that we distinguish between historical versus climate driven migration and recognizes how the impacts of climate change can extend beyond the affected area.

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Development of sustainable and resilient water infrastructure is an urgent challenge for urban areas to secure long-term water availability and mitigate negative impacts of water consumption and urban development. A hybrid system that combines centralized water infrastructure and household decentralized water facilities, including rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling, may be a solution to more sustainable and resilient water management in urban areas. Understanding household and community preferences for decentralized water facilities is important to inform the design and ultimately the promotion and adoption of such systems.

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Ecological distance-based spatial capture-recapture models (SCR) are a promising approach for simultaneously estimating animal density and connectivity, both of which affect spatial population processes and ultimately species persistence. We explored how SCR models can be integrated into reserve-design frameworks that explicitly acknowledge both the spatial distribution of individuals and their space use resulting from landscape structure. We formulated the design of wildlife reserves as a budget-constrained optimization problem and conducted a simulation to explore 3 different SCR-informed optimization objectives that prioritized different conservation goals by maximizing the number of protected individuals, reserve connectivity, and density-weighted connectivity.

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In real physical systems the underlying spatial components might not have crisp boundaries and their interactions might not be instantaneous. To this end, we propose -MAPS; a method that identifies spatially contiguous and possibly overlapping components referred to as , and identifies the lagged functional relationships between them. Informally, a domain is a spatially contiguous region that somehow participates in the same dynamic effect or function.

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Conservation biologists recognize that a system of isolated protected areas will be necessary but insufficient to meet biodiversity objectives. Current approaches to connecting core conservation areas through corridors consider optimal corridor placement based on a single optimization goal: commonly, maximizing the movement for a target species across a network of protected areas. We show that designing corridors for single species based on purely ecological criteria leads to extremely expensive linkages that are suboptimal for multispecies connectivity objectives.

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