Search for: All records

Environmental stressors and natural disasters are changing the physical landscapes in many countries worldwide. In this paper, we ask whether and how erosion affects internal and international migration in Bangladesh. Building on prior studies, we use data from 3,600 households in 18 research sites to investigate how erosion in tidal and river channels is related to the risk of making a first internal or international trip, net of extreme weather conditions and other relevant attributes. Findings reveal that the relationship between erosion and the likelihood of making a first domestic or international trip is moderated by livelihood type and landownership. As erosion worsens, the odds ofmaking a first domestic trip rise for non-agricultural non-landowning household heads and decline for landowners working in agriculture. Estimated lifetime probabilities of making a first domestic trip are higher than those of making a first international trip, with non-agricultural non-landowners having the highest probabilities and agricultural landowners having the lowest. Together, the evidence suggests that shifts in physical landscapes, especially erosion, are tightly linked to out-migration through ties to land. 

Mistletoes are branch parasites of trees and shrubs, and keystone species found world-wide that have diverse biotic interactions with seed dispersers, pollinators, and animals that use mistletoes for shelter. They also restructure ecological communities, increasing productivity and biotic diversity. Given their important roles within their communities, a better understanding of their correlations with contemporary and predicted future climates will facilitate our understanding of the challenging aerial landscapes they inhabit. Currently mistletoe occurrence is largely attributed to host preference and availability, even though most mistletoes have many host trees and generally host tree ranges are greater than those of their mistletoes. Using Australian occurrence records and climate data with statistical analyses and modeling, we investigated correlations between climatic variables and mistletoe species distribution, richness, and predicted contemporary and future habitat suitability. Distributions of Australian mistletoe revealed differences among haustorial type and in some cases also genera and showed that ancestral haustorial types were associated with mesic ancestral habitats while derived types were generally associated with drier habitats that are considered derived within Australia. We found significant correlations with a suite of climatic variables, especially but not exclusively precipitation and temperature variables. We conclude that mistletoe distributional patterns, especially when haustorium type is considered, are correlated with climate, similar to other angiosperms. Mistletoes are vulnerable to the warmer, drier climates predicted for Australia and are expected to lose suitable habitat, primarily in interior arid regions of Australia. Ranges of species currently in northeastern tropical and subtropical regions will contract further north while those in semi-arid and arid regions are predicted to mostly shift south and southwest into temperate, montane, and Mediterranean habitat types. 

Abstract Although digital health solutions are increasingly popular in clinical psychiatry, one application that has not been fully explored is the utilization of survey technology to monitor patients outside of the clinic. Supplementing routine care with digital information collected in the “clinical whitespace” between visits could improve care for patients with severe mental illness. This study evaluated the feasibility and validity of using online self-report questionnaires to supplement in-person clinical evaluations in persons with and without psychiatric diagnoses. We performed a rigorous in-person clinical diagnostic and assessment battery in 54 participants with schizophrenia (N = 23), depressive disorder (N = 14), and healthy controls (N = 17) using standard assessments for depressive and psychotic symptomatology. Participants were then asked to complete brief online assessments of depressive (Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology) and psychotic (Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences) symptoms outside of the clinic for comparison with the ground-truth in-person assessments. We found that online self-report ratings of severity were significantly correlated with the clinical assessments for depression (two assessments used: R = 0.63, p < 0.001; R = 0.73, p < 0.001) and psychosis (R = 0.62, p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of collecting psychiatric symptom ratings through online surveys. Surveillance of this kind may be especially useful in detecting acute mental health crises between patient visits and can generally contribute to more comprehensive psychiatric treatment. 

Multimodal depression classification has gained immense popularity over the recent years. We develop a multimodal depression classification system using articulatory coordination features extracted from vocal tract variables and text transcriptions obtained from an automatic speech recognition tool that yields improvements of area under the receiver operating characteristics curve compared to unimodal classifiers (7.5% and 13.7% for audio and text respectively). We show that in the case of limited training data, a segment-level classifier can first be trained to then obtain a session-wise prediction without hindering the performance, using a multi-stage convolutional recurrent neural network. A text model is trained using a Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN). The multimodal system is developed by combining embeddings from the session-level audio model and the HAN text model.