Outdoor mental healthcare: What, who, why and where to?

Outdoor mental healthcare can increase the breadth of multidisciplinary interventions available to people with a therapeutic need. The aim of this article is to educate readers about the field of outdoor mental healthcare through the exploration of a series of basic questions. Outdoor mental healthcare spans a range of therapies that apply a variety of theoretical approaches and treatments across a multiplicity of settings, patient groups and desired outcomes unified by key evidence-informed practice elements.

Wildlife nidoviruses: biology, epidemiology, and disease associations of selected nidoviruses of mammals and reptiles.

Wildlife is the source of many emerging infectious diseases. Several viruses from the order have recently emerged in wildlife, sometimes with severe consequences for endangered species. The order is currently classified into eight suborders, three of which contain viruses of vertebrates.

Which soil microbiome? Bacteria, fungi, and protozoa communities show different relationships with urban green space type and use-intensity.

Exposure to diverse microbial communities early in life can help support healthy human immune function. Soil microbiomes in public and private urban green spaces are potentially important sources of contact with diverse microbiomes for much of the global population. However, we lack understanding of how soil microbial communities vary across and within urban green spaces, and whether these patterns vary across microbial kingdoms; closing this knowledge gap may help us optimise green spaces' capacities to provide this ecosystem service.

Physical Activity and Food Environments in and around Schools: A Case Study in Regional North-West Tasmania.

A better understanding of the physical activity (PA) infrastructure in schools, the walkability of neighborhoods close to schools, and the food environments around schools, particularly in rural, socioeconomically challenged areas such as the North-West (NW) of Tasmania, could be important in the wider effort to improve the health of school-age children. Accordingly, this research aimed to assess PA resources, walkability, and food environments in and around schools in three socioeconomically disadvantaged, regional/rural Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Tasmania, Australia. A census of schools (including assessment of the PA infrastructure quality within school grounds), a walkability assessment, and a census of food outlets surrounding schools (through geospatial mapping) were executed.

Nature-Based Citizen Science as a Mechanism to Improve Human Health in Urban Areas.

The world is becoming increasingly urbanised, impacting human interactions with natural environments (NEs). NEs take a number of forms, ranging from pristine, modified, to built NEs, which are common in many urban areas. NEs may include nature-based solutions, such as introducing nature elements and biological processes into cities that are used to solve problems created by urbanisation.

A Spatial Analysis of Access to Physical Activity Infrastructure and Healthy Food in Regional Tasmania.

Prevalence of physical inactivity and obesity continues to increase in regional areas such as North-West (NW) Tasmania and show no signs of abating. It is possible that limited access to physical activity infrastructure (PAI) and healthier food options are exacerbating the low levels of habitual physical activity and obesity prevalence in these communities. Despite a burgeoning research base, concomitant exploration of both physical activity and food environments in rural and regional areas remain scarce.

Urbanisation reduces the abundance and diversity of airborne microbes - but what does that mean for our health? A systematic review.

Over half of people live in cities and while urban environments offer myriad social, cultural and economic benefits, they alter the microbial communities to which people are exposed: with potentially important but underexplored health impacts. In particular, higher rates of asthma and allergies in urban areas have been linked to urban-altered microbial communities - including aerial microbial communities. To date, however, there has been no synthesis of the disparate literature on the impacts of urbanisation on aerial microbial communities, making it difficult to ascertain potential health impacts.

An oral bait vaccination approach for the Tasmanian devil facial tumor diseases.

: The Tasmanian devil () is the largest extant carnivorous marsupial. Since 1996, its population has declined by 77% primarily due to a clonal transmissible tumor, known as devil facial tumor (DFT1) disease. In 2014, a second transmissible devil facial tumor (DFT2) was discovered.

Urban-associated diseases: Candidate diseases, environmental risk factors, and a path forward.

Background: Cities are home to over half the global population; that proportion is expected to rise to 70% by mid-century. The urban environment differs greatly from that in which humans evolved, with potentially important consequences for health. Rates for allergic, inflammatory and auto-immune diseases appear to rise with urbanization and be higher in the more urbanized nations of the world which has led some to suggest that cities promote the occurrence of these diseases.

Astro-ecology? Shifting the interdisciplinary collaboration paradigm.

We present a case study whereby ecological research on fallen trees in forest plots was advanced by a collaboration with astronomers working on the vector fields of stars and gas, and we propose a framework by which such novel collaborations can progress.

Forecasting future global food demand: A systematic review and meta-analysis of model complexity.

Predicting future food demand is a critical step for formulating the agricultural, economic and conservation policies required to feed over 9 billion people by 2050 while doing minimal harm to the environment. However, published future food demand estimates range substantially, making it difficult to determine optimal policies. Here we present a systematic review of the food demand literature-including a meta-analysis of papers reporting average global food demand predictions-and test the effect of model complexity on predictions.

Ross River Virus and the Necessity of Multiscale, Eco-epidemiological Analyses.

Background: Zoonotic vector-borne disease prevalence is affected by vector, human, and reservoir host factors, which are influenced by habitat and climate; these 5 components interact on microhabitat-to-landscape scales but are often analyzed at a single spatial scale.

Methods: We present an information theoretic, multiscale, multiple regression analysis of the ecological drivers of Ross River virus. We analyze the spatial pattern of 20 years of Ross River virus infections from South Australia (1992-2012; n = 5261), using variables across these 5 components of disease ecology at 3 spatial scales.

Socioecological predictors of immune defences in wild spotted hyenas.

Social rank can profoundly affect many aspects of mammalian reproduction and stress physiology, but little is known about how immune function is affected by rank and other socio-ecological factors in free-living animals.In this study we examine the effects of sex, social rank, and reproductive status on immune function in long-lived carnivores that are routinely exposed to a plethora of pathogens, yet rarely show signs of disease.Here we show that two types of immune defenses, complement-mediated bacterial killing capacity (BKC) and total IgM, are positively correlated with social rank in wild hyenas, but that a third type, total IgG, does not vary with rank.

Regional Comparison of Mosquito Bloodmeals in South Australia: Implications for Ross River Virus Ecology.

Ross River virus (RRV) is responsible for the most notifications of human arboviral infection in Australia. Seroprevalence and experimental infection studies have implicated macropods (e.g.

Converting Mosquito Surveillance to Arbovirus Surveillance with Honey-Baited Nucleic Acid Preservation Cards.

Spatially and temporally accurate information about infectious mosquito distribution allows for pre-emptive public health interventions that can reduce the burden of mosquito-borne infections on human populations. However, the labile nature of arboviruses, the low prevalence of infection in mosquitoes, the expensive labor costs for mosquito identification and sorting, and the specialized equipment required for arbovirus testing can obstruct arbovirus surveillance efforts. The recently developed techniques of testing mosquito expectorate using honey-baited nucleic acid preservation cards or sugar bait stations allows a sensitive method of testing for infectious, rather than infected, mosquito vectors.