Introduction: Wearable devices are rapidly improving our ability to observe health-related processes for extended durations in an unintrusive manner. In this study, we use wearable devices to understand how the shape of the heart rate curve during sleep relates to mental health.
Methods: As part of the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS), we collected heart rate measurements using the Oura ring (Gen3) for over 25,000 sleep periods and self-reported mental health indicators from roughly 600 first-year university students in the USA during the fall semester of 2022.
Consumer wearables have been successful at measuring sleep and may be useful in predicting changes in mental health measures such as stress. A key challenge remains in quantifying the relationship between sleep measures associated with physiologic stress and a user's experience of stress. Students from a public university enrolled in the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS) provided continuous biometric data and answered weekly surveys during their first semester of college between October-December 2022.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystem change can profoundly affect human well-being and health, including through changes in exposure to vector-borne diseases. Deforestation has increased human exposure to mosquito vectors and malaria risk in Africa, but there is little understanding of how socioeconomic and ecological factors influence the relationship between deforestation and malaria risk. We examined these interrelationships in six sub-Saharan African countries using demographic and health survey data linked to remotely sensed environmental variables for 11,746 children under 5 years old.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The transition to college is a period of elevated risk for a range of mental health conditions. Although colleges and universities strive to provide mental health support to their students, the high demand for these services makes it difficult to provide scalable, cost-effective solutions.
Objective: To address these issues, the present study aims to compare the efficacy of three different treatments using a large cohort of 600 students transitioning to college.
Most terrestrial angiosperms form mutualisms with both mycorrhizal fungi and animal pollinators. Yet, the effects of mycorrhizae on pollinator behavior and plant reproduction are unknown for most species, and whether the source or type of mycorrhizal fungi affects reproductive success has rarely been examined. We examined whether inoculating highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum; Ericaceae) with ericoid mycorrhizal fungi enhanced investment in flowering and attractiveness to pollinators, and thus reduced their levels of pollen limitation over that of non-inoculated plants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLOS Glob Public Health
September 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the mobility patterns of a majority of Americans beginning in March 2020. Despite the beneficial, socially distanced activity offered by outdoor recreation, confusing and contradictory public health messaging complicated access to natural spaces. Working with a dataset comprising the locations of roughly 50 million distinct mobile devices in 2019 and 2020, we analyze weekly visitation patterns for 8,135 parks across the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodiversity-mediated ecosystem services (ES) support human well-being, but their values are typically estimated individually. Although ES are part of complex socioecological systems, we know surprisingly little about how multiple ES interact ecologically and economically. Interactions could be positive (synergy), negative (trade-offs), or absent (additive effects), with strong implications for management and valuation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relationship between nature contact and mental well-being has received increasing attention in recent years. While a body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating a positive relationship between time in nature and mental well-being, there have been few studies comparing this relationship in different locations over long periods of time. In this study, we analyze over 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe introduction of non-native species and deforestation are both important drivers of environmental change that can also facilitate the geographic spread of zoonotic pathogens and increase disease risk in humans. With ongoing trends in globalization and land-use conversions, introduced species and deforestation are ever more likely to pose threats to human health. Here, we used rat lungworm disease, an emerging zoonotic disease caused by and maintained by invasive rats and snails, to explore how these two forms of environmental change can impact zoonotic disease risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAddressing how ecosystem services (ES) are distributed among groups of people is critical for making conservation and environmental policy-making more equitable. Here, we evaluate the distribution and equity of changes in ES benefits across demographic and socioeconomic groups in the United States (US) between 2020 and 2100. Specifically, we use land cover and population projections to model potential shifts in the supply, demand, and benefits of the following ES: provision of clean air, protection against a vector-borne disease (West Nile virus), and crop pollination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExcess phosphorus loading to waterbodies has led to increasing frequency and severity of harmful algal blooms, negatively impacting economic activity and human health. While interventions to improve water quality can create large societal benefits, these investments are costly and the value of benefits is often unknown. Understanding the social and economic impacts of reduced phosphorus loading is critical for developing effective land use policies and for generating public and political support for these initiatives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpatial aspects of connectivity have received considerable attention from ecologists and conservationists, yet temporal connectivity, the periodic linking of habitats, plays an equally important, but largely overlooked role. Different biological and biophysical attributes of ecosystems underpin temporal connectivity, but here we focus on resource continuity, the uninterrupted availability of foraging sites. We test the response of pollinators to resource continuity at community, population, and individual levels using a novel natural experiment consisting of farms with either single or sequential cropping systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSupporting ecosystem services and conserving biodiversity may be compatible goals, but there is concern that service-focused interventions mostly benefit a few common species. We use a spatially replicated, multiyear experiment in four agricultural settings to test if enhancing habitat adjacent to crops increases wild bee diversity and abundance on and off crops. We found that enhanced field edges harbored more taxonomically and functionally abundant, diverse, and compositionally different bee communities compared to control edges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPremise: Most plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi and animal pollinators simultaneously. Yet, whether mycorrhizae affect traits important to pollination remains poorly understood and may depend on the match between host and fungal genotypes. Here, we examined how ericoid mycorrhizal fungi affected flowering phenology, floral traits, and reproductive success, among eight genotypes of highbush blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum (Ericaceae).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany scientific researchers aspire to engage policy in their writing, but translating scientific research and findings into policy discussion often requires an understanding of the institutional complexities of legal and policy processes and actors. To examine how researchers have undertaken that challenge, we developed a set of metrics and applied them to articles published in one of the principal academic publication venues for science and policy-Science magazine's Policy Forum. We reviewed each Policy Forum article published over a five-year period (2011-15), 220 in all.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSafeguarding ecosystem services and biodiversity is critical to achieving sustainable development. To date, ecosystem services quantification has focused on the biophysical supply of services with less emphasis on human beneficiaries (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicronutrient deficiency affects about a third of the world's population. Children in developing countries are particularly vulnerable. Consequences include impaired cognitive and physical development and increased childhood morbidity and mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNatural-infrastructures (e.g., floodplains) can offer multiple ecosystem services (ES), including flood-resilience and water quality improvement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPayment for hydrological services (PHS) are popular tools for conserving ecosystems and their water-related services. However, improving the spatial targeting and impacts of PHS, as well as their ability to foster synergies with other ecosystem services (ES), remain challenging. We aimed at using spatial analyses to evaluate the targeting performance of México's National PHS program in central Veracruz.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNative managed bees can improve crop pollination, but a general framework for evaluating the associated economic costs and benefits has not been developed. We conducted a cost-benefit analysis to assess how managing blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria Say [Hymenoptera: Megachildae]) alongside honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus [Hymenoptera: Apidae]) can affect profits for almond growers in California. Specifically, we studied how adjusting three strategies can influence profits: (1) number of released O.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiarrheal disease (DD) due to contaminated water is a major cause of child mortality globally. Forests and wetlands can provide ecosystem services that help maintain water quality. To understand the connections between land cover and childhood DD, we compiled a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries with information on health, socioeconomic factors, climate, and watershed condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
September 2017
Climate change will cause geographic range shifts for pollinators and major crops, with global implications for food security and rural livelihoods. However, little is known about the potential for coupled impacts of climate change on pollinators and crops. Coffee production exemplifies this issue, because large losses in areas suitable for coffee production have been projected due to climate change and because coffee production is dependent on bee pollination.
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