QFASA: A Comprehensive R Package for Diet Estimation via Fatty Acid Signature Analysis.

Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) is a well-established diet estimation method that has been used extensively on a wide variety of marine mammal species. The method, along with its new refinements and extensions, requires the use of statistically intricate tools, many of which are computationally demanding. Recent developments in QFASA include a maximum likelihood framework for diet estimation, statistically valid inference procedures such as confidence intervals for the diet and hypothesis tests for comparing fatty acid signatures and/or diets, a measure of repeatability in the diet estimates, a prey species selection algorithm, as well as novel ways to estimate calibration coefficients, which are used to improve accuracy in the estimates.

Measles in Canada: modelling outbreaks with variable vaccine coverage and interventions.

Background: The global incidence of measles has increased markedly since 2023. In Canada, where measles has had elimination status for more than two decades, most cases can typically be traced to travel. While the majority of Canadians are vaccinated against the measles virus, or considered immune due to previous infection, there are communities with low vaccination coverage.