NABat: A top-down,bottom-up solution to collaborative continental-scale monitoring

Collaborative monitoring over broad scales and levels of ecological organization can inform conservation efforts necessary to address the contemporary biodiversity crisis. An important challenge to collaborative monitoring is motivating local engagement with enough buy-in from stakeholders while providing adequate top-down direction for scientific rigor, quality control, and coordination. Collaborative monitoring must reconcile this inherent tension between top-down control and bottom-up engagement. Highly mobile and cryptic taxa, such as bats, present a particularly acute challenge. Given their scale of movement, complex life histories, and rapidly expanding threats, understanding population trends of bats requires coordinated broad-scale collaborative monitoring. The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) reconciles top-down, bottom-up tension with a hierarchical master sample survey design, integrated data analysis, dynamic data curation, regional monitoring hubs, and knowledge delivery through web-based infrastructure. NABat supports collaborative monitoring across spatial and organizational scales and the full annual lifecycle of bats.     

Hg concentrations and stable isotope variations in tropical fish species of a gold-mining-impacted watershed in French Guiana

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - The aim of the study was to determine if gold-mining activities could impact the mercury (Hg) concentrations and isotopic signatures in freshwater...     

Steel mill waste application in soil: dynamics of potentially toxic elements in rice and health risk perspectives

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Potentially toxic elements (PTEs) are of great concern in steel mill wastes. Therefore, in order to use them as potential fertilizers in soil, risk...     

Small-scale on-site treatment of fecal matter: comparison of treatments for resource recovery and sanitization

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - On-site small-scale sanitation is common in rural areas and areas without infrastructure, but the treatment of the collected fecal matter can be...     

Glyphosate concentrations in global freshwaters: are aquatic organisms at risk?

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Glyphosate is the most used herbicide worldwide. Many studies have reported glyphosate risks to aquatic organisms of different trophic levels....     

Impact of municipal solid waste dumpsites on trace metal contamination levels in the surrounding area: a case study in West Africa,Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - The impact of uncontrolled municipal dumping sites on metal contamination in the surrounding waters, sediments, and soils are of great concern in many...     

A GIS-based approach for geospatial modeling of groundwater vulnerability and pollution risk mapping in Bou-Areg and Gareb aquifers,northeastern Morocco

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Groundwater resources are the main supply of freshwater for human activities. Nevertheless, during the last 50 years, groundwater has become very...     

Tissue distribution of perfluoroalkyl acids and health status in wild Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) from Loskop Dam, Mpumalanga, South Africa

This study examined concentrations of 15 perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) in tissues from male Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) collected at Loskop Dam, Mpumalanga, South Africa in 2014 and 2016. Nine of the 15 PFAAs were detected frequently and were included in statistical analysis and included two of the most commonly known PFAAs, perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) (median, 41.6 ng/g) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) (median, 0.0825 ng/g). Of the tissues measured, plasma (2016 and 2014 median, 22.2 ng/g) contained the highest PFAA burden followed by (in descending order): liver (median, 11.6 ng/g), kidney (median, 9.04 ng/g), spleen (median, 5.92 ng/g), adipose (median, 2.54 ng/g), and muscle (median, 1.11 ng/g). Loskop Dam tilapia have been affected by an inflammatory disease of the adipose tissue known as pansteatitis, so this study also aimed to investigate relationships between PFAA tissue concentrations and incidence of pansteatitis or fish health status. Results revealed that healthy tilapia exhibited an overall higher (p-value < 0.05) PFAA burden than pansteatitis-affected tilapia across all tissues. Further analysis showed that organs previously noted in the literature to contain the highest PFAA concentrations, such as kidney, liver, and plasma, were the organs driving the difference in PFAA burden between the two tilapia groups. Care must be taken in the interpretations we draw from not only the results of our study, but also other PFAA measurements made on populations (human and wildlife alike) under differing health status.