Publications by authors named "Carly Sponarski"

Article Synopsis
  • Forest management practices, like timber harvesting and invasive species removal, can impact wildlife habitat and influence the life cycle of disease vectors such as the black-legged tick, which transmits Lyme disease.
  • The study found that higher numbers of trees and basal area per hectare led to increased canopy closure and tick nymph densities, while affecting microclimate conditions like temperature and humidity.
  • The strongest predictor of nymph densities was the structure of the understory, and there was no link between tree quantity and deer activity or tick infection prevalence, aiding in more effective forest management strategies.
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Hard-bodied ticks have become a major concern in temperate regions because they transmit a variety of pathogens of medical significance. Ticks and pathogens interact with hosts in a complex social-ecological system (SES) that influences human exposure to tick-borne diseases (TBD). We argue that addressing the urgent public health threat posed by TBD requires an understanding of the integrated processes in the forest ecosystem that influence tick density and infection prevalence, transmission among ticks, animal hosts, and ultimately disease prevalence in humans.

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Collaborative governance structures are increasingly common among natural resource managers. While studies have assessed the conditions under which collaborative action occurs, little emphasis has been placed on the role leadership may play in joint-jurisdictional systems. Management of species under the Endangered Species Act offers an opportunity to assess the collaboration of federal, state, and tribal resource agencies.

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Tick-borne disease poses a growing public health burden in the United States and understanding the patterns of presence and density of infected vector ticks is key to developing and implementing effective public health management strategies. Citizen science has emerged as a highly effective means to generate data sets on the geographical distribution of tick species. But to date, nearly all citizen science studies of ticks are 'passive surveillance' programs in which researchers accept reports of ticks, together with either physical specimens or digital images, found opportunistically on people, pets, and livestock from community members for species identification and in some cases also tick-borne pathogen detection.

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Lyme disease has emerged as a growing epidemic across the U.S., with tick populations spreading north because of a plethora of human-induced factors.

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Governance gaps at both the federal and state level increasingly necessitate local action and remain a key driver of community-based solutions. A localist paradigm-encompassing models such as community-based management, citizen science, and cooperative research-offers a promising approach for bridging governance gaps by engaging citizens, co-producing knowledge, fostering trust, and developing innovative solutions to address complex conservation challenges. Yet, despite notable successes, significant barriers constrain widespread implementation of localist approaches.

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The terms 'coexistence', 'tolerance,' and 'acceptance' appear frequently in conservation literature, but lack consistent characterization, making them difficult to apply across intervention frameworks. This review aims to describe the common characterizations of these three terms using Africa-based research as a case study. Through systematic lexical searches, we identified 392 papers containing one or more of the three terms.

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