Background: Climate change has been identified as one of the biggest threats to human health. Despite this claim, there are no standardized tools that assess the rigor of published literature for use in weight of evidence (WOE) reviews. Standardized assessment tools are essential for creating clear and comparable WOE reviews. As such, we developed a standardized tool for evaluating the quality of climate change and health studies focused on evaluating studies that quantify exposure-response relationships and studies that implement and/or evaluate adaptation interventions.
Methods: The authors explored systematic-review methodology to enhance transparency and increase efficiency in summarizing and synthesizing findings from studies on climate change and health research. The authors adapted and extended existing WOE methods to develop the CHANGE (Climate Health ANalysis Grading Evaluation) tool. The resulting assessment tool has been refined through application and subsequent team input.
Results: The CHANGE tool is a two-step standardized tool for systematic review of climate change and health studies of exposure-response relationships and adaptation intervention studies. Step one of the CHANGE tool aims to classify studies included in weight-of-evidence reviews and step two assesses the quality and presence of bias in the climate change and health studies.
Conclusion: The application of the CHANGE tool in WOE reviews of climate change and health will lead to increased comparability, objectivity, and transparency within this research area.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-023-01040-4 | DOI Listing |
Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis has become a popular conservation tool for detecting rare and elusive species. eDNA assays typically target mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) due to its high copy number per cell and its ability to persist in the environment longer than nuclear DNA. Consequently, the development of eDNA assays has relied on mitochondrial reference sequences available in online databases, or in cases where such data are unavailable, de novo DNA extraction and sequencing of mtDNA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConserv Physiol
January 2025
Department of Zoology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Assessing how at-risk species respond to co-occurring stressors is critical for predicting climate change vulnerability. In this study, we characterized how young-of-the-year White Sturgeon () cope with warming and low oxygen (hypoxia) and investigated whether prior exposure to one stressor may improve the tolerance to a subsequent stressor through "cross-tolerance". Fish were acclimated to five temperatures within their natural range (14-22°C) for one month prior to assessment of thermal tolerance (critical thermal maxima, CTmax) and hypoxia tolerance (incipient lethal oxygen saturation, ILOS; tested at 20°C).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
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Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet, Silwood Park, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK.
Current rates of habitat and biodiversity loss, and the threat they pose to ecological and economic productivity, would be considered a global emergency even if they were not occurring during a period of rapid anthropogenic climate change. Diversity at all levels of biological organization, both within and among species, and across genomes and communities, is critical for the resilience of the world's ecosystems in the face of such change. However, it remains an urgent scientific challenge to understand how biodiversity underpins these ecological outputs, how patterns of biodiversity are being affected by current threats, and how and where such biodiversity contributes most directly to human economies, well-being and social justice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
January 2025
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Food production does more damage to wild species than any other sector of human activity, yet how best to limit its growing impact is greatly contested. Reviewing progress to date in interventions that encourage less damaging diets or cut food loss and waste, we conclude that both are essential but far from sufficient. In terms of production, field studies from five continents quantifying the population-level impacts of land sharing, land sparing, intermediate and mixed approaches for almost 2000 individually assessed species show that implementing high-yield farming to spare natural habitats consistently outperforms land sharing, particularly for species of highest conservation concern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
January 2025
Biodiversity Futures Lab, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK.
Georgina Mace proposed bending the curve of biodiversity loss as a fitting ambition for the Convention on Biological Diversity. The new Global Biodiversity Monitoring Framework (GBMF) may increase the chances of meeting the goals and targets in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), which requires bending the curve. To meet the outcome goals of KMGBF, the GBMF should support adaptive policy responses to the state of biodiversity, which in turn requires a 'satnav' for nature.
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