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Results for “environmental change”

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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1987

Staff attitude changes after environmental changes on a ward for psychogeriatric patients.

On a ward for chronic elderly patients, mostly senile demented patients, several environmental changes were performed to improve the patients' behaviors. Before and after these changes, the staff (N = 12) were asked about their attitudes in relation to different issues, according to a semantic differential scheme. The semantic differential scheme consisted (apart from six distractor pairs) of the following semantic pairs: (a) negative-positive, (b) valueless-valuable, (c) bad-good, (d) onesided-manysided, (e) unimportant-important, and (f) stupid-smart. The object sentences tested with this semantic differential scheme were (1) cleaning the ward, (2) the patients' meals, (3) dressing the patients, and (4) social interaction with patients. The results showed significant positive changes in staff attitudes towards the patients in the three last object sentences. These also corresponded to the interventions made in the environmental program, whereas "cleaning the ward" was not really changed during the program. It is concluded that improvements in patient behaviors on the ward has important positive effects also on the staff attitudes.

Aged↗
PubMed2007

Changed environmental conditions weaken sexual selection in sticklebacks.

Environmental heterogeneity can cause the intensity and direction of selection to vary in time and space. Yet, the effects of human-induced environmental changes on sexual selection and the expression of mating traits of native species are poorly known. Currently, the breeding habitats of the three-spined stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus are changing in the Baltic Sea because of eutrophication and increased growth of algae. Here we show that enhanced growth of filamentous algae increases the costs of mating by inducing an increase in the time and energy spent on courtship and mate choice. This is not followed by a concomitant increase in mate attraction, but instead the strength of selection on male red nuptial coloration and courtship activity is relaxed. Thus, the high investment into the costly sexually selected traits is maladaptive under the new conditions, and the mating system mediates a negative effect of the environmental change on the population. We attribute these environmentally induced changes in the benefit of the mating traits and in the strength of sexual selection to reduced visibility in dense vegetation. Anthropogenic disturbances hence affect the selection pressures that mould the species, which could have long-term effects on the viability and evolution of the populations.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Behavioral change with environmental change.

The influence of sheltered workshop and community employment on inappropriate behaviors of six people with developmental disabilities was examined. During the first 3 months of community employment the mean decrease in targeted behaviors was 94%.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Medical responsibility and global environmental change.

Global environmental change threatens the habitability of the planet and the health of its inhabitants. Toxic pollution of air and water, acid rain, destruction of stratospheric ozone, waste, species extinction and, potentially, global warming are produced by the growing numbers and activities of human beings. Progression of these environmental changes could lead to unprecedented human suffering. Physicians can treat persons experiencing the consequences of environmental change but cannot individually prevent the cause of their suffering. Physicians have information and expertise about environmental change that can contribute to its slowing or prevention. Work to prevent global environmental change is consistent with the social responsibility of physicians and other health professionals.

Climate↗
PubMed1995

Sensitizing nurses for a changing environmental health role.

This paper traces the evolution of a broader environmental health role for nursing by focusing on the health effects of exposure to environmental pollutants and of global environmental change. This evolving role is reviewed through the examination of selected community health nursing texts published during the last several decades. Key role strategies based on this expanded and evolving environmental role are proposed. Finally, a survey is described that is intended to heighten awareness of personal and professional attitudes and behaviors related to the environment.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Environmental change, land use and water quality in Scotland: current issues and future prospects.

An outline of both the scientific and management needs facing the future water quality issues of Scotland is discussed. The scientific needs are considered in terms of monitoring to increase the understanding of hydrochemical processes, issues of scaling, and the need for improved modelling under changing environmental processes. In terms of the management needs, the requirements highlighted relate to improving the ecological quality of Scottish rivers and the implementation of integrated river basin management plans.

Agriculture↗
PubMed2005

Using the satellite-derived NDVI to assess ecological responses to environmental change.

Assessing how environmental changes affect the distribution and dynamics of vegetation and animal populations is becoming increasingly important for terrestrial ecologists to enable better predictions of the effects of global warming, biodiversity reduction or habitat degradation. The ability to predict ecological responses has often been hampered by our rather limited understanding of trophic interactions. Indeed, it has proven difficult to discern direct and indirect effects of environmental change on animal populations owing to limited information about vegetation at large temporal and spatial scales. The rapidly increasing use of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in ecological studies has recently changed this situation. Here, we review the use of the NDVI in recent ecological studies and outline its possible key role in future research of environmental change in an ecosystem context.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Global environmental change: what can health care providers and the environmental health community do about it now?

The debate about whether global environmental change is real is now over; in its wake is the realization that it is happening more rapidly than predicted. These changes constitute a profound challenge to human health, both as a direct threat and as a promoter of other risks. We call on health care providers to inform themselves about these issues and to become agents of change in their communities. It is our responsibility as clinicians to educate patients and their communities on the connections between regressive policies, unsustainable behaviors, global environmental changes, and threats to health and security. We call on professional organizations to assist in educating their members about these issues, in helping clinicians practice behavior change with their patients, and in adding their voices to this issue in our statehouses and Congress. We call for the development of carbon and other environmental-labeling of consumer products so individuals can make informed choices; we also call for the rapid implementation of policies that provide tangible economic incentives for choosing environmentally sustainable products and services. We urge the environmental health community to take up the challenge of developing a global environmental health index that will incorporate human health into available "planetary health" metrics and that can be used as a policy tool to evaluate the impact of interventions and document spatial and temporal shifts in the healthfulness of local areas. Finally, we urge our political, business, public health, and academic leaders to heed these environmental warnings and quickly develop regulatory and policy solutions so that the health of populations and the integrity of their environments will be ensured for future generations.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1998

Social and cultural impacts of environmental change on aboriginal Peoples in Canada.

Environmental change, often the result of Western industrial development, has had a major impact on Canadian Aboriginal people. Even when there are no provable direct health effects, Aboriginal peoples' holistic concepts of health, balance, and harmony, and the interrelatedness of health and environment lead them to regard social and cultural effects as health effects. This paper explores the links between environmental change and the social and cultural and, hence, health effects these changes produce. It is argued that factors such as Aboriginal holistic concepts of environment and health, perceptions of risk, and difficulties in communication contribute to these social and cultural effects and their subsequent health effects-effects which frequently present a greater problem in Canadian Aboriginal communities than do the direct health effects of environmental change.

American Indian or Alaska Native↗
PubMed2004

Continuing the debate on the role of Quaternary environmental change for macroevolution.

The Quaternary has been a period of dramatic environmental change for the past 1.8 Myr, with major shifts in distributions and abundances of terrestrial and marine organisms. The evolutionary consequences of this have been debated since the nineteenth century. However, the lack of accurate relative and absolute time-scales for evolutions and environmental change inhibited progress. We do now have an understanding of time-scales. Palaeoecology has demonstrated the individualistic nature of species' response to environmental change, but lacks a means of determining ancestry. DNA characterization of modern populations in relation to their distributions nicely complements palaeoecological results by contributing ancestry. The chance to understand how species originate and the causal factors of speciation (environmental change or otherwise) may be within reach.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Changes in gene expression as biochemical adaptations to environmental change: a tribute to Peter Hochachka.

Changes in gene expression are likely to play a critical role in both acclimation and adaptation to a changing environment. There is a rapidly growing body of literature implicating quantitative changes in gene expression during acclimation to environmental change, but less is known about the role of qualitative changes in gene expression, such as switching between alternative isoforms. Alternative isoforms can arise via gene duplication, alternative splicing, or alternative promoter usage. Organisms that have undergone recent genome duplication events may make use of environment-specific isoforms coded by multiple genes, but their role in other organisms is less well known. However, recent data suggest that isoforms arising from alternative splicing may be an under-appreciated source of physiological variation. The role of changes in gene expression during evolutionary adaptation has received comparatively limited attention, but novel approaches to addressing the adaptive significance of changes in gene expression have been applied to a few cases of differences in gene expression among taxa. Recent advances in genomics, including microarray technology, knock-out and knock-down approaches, and the wealth of data coming from large-scale sequencing projects have provided (and will continue to provide at ever increasing rates) new insights into these classic questions in comparative biochemistry.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed2006

Plant-plant interactions and environmental change.

Natural systems are being subjected to unprecedented rates of change and unique pressures from a combination of anthropogenic environmental change drivers. Plant-plant interactions are an important part of the mechanisms governing the response of plant species and communities to these drivers. For example, competition plays a central role in mediating the impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, climate change and invasive nonnative species. Other plant-plant interaction processes are also being recognized as important factors in determining the impacts of environmental change, including facilitation and evolutionary processes associated with plant-plant interactions. However, plant-plant interactions are not the only factors determining the response of species and communities to environmental change drivers - their activity must be placed within the context of the wide range of factors that regulate species, communities and ecosystems. A major research challenge is to understand when plant-plant interactions play a key role in regulating the impact of environmental change drivers, and the type of role that plant-plant interactions play. Although this is a considerable challenge, some areas of current research may provide the starting point to achieving these goals, and should be pursued through large-scale, integrated, multisite experiments.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed2000

Effects of environmental change on emerging parasitic diseases.

Ecological disturbances exert an influence on the emergence and proliferation of malaria and zoonotic parasitic diseases, including, Leishmaniasis, cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis, filariasis, onchocerciasis, and loiasis. Each environmental change, whether occurring as a natural phenomenon or through human intervention, changes the ecological balance and context within which disease hosts or vectors and parasites breed, develop, and transmit disease. Each species occupies a particular ecological niche and vector species sub-populations are distinct behaviourally and genetically as they adapt to man-made environments. Most zoonotic parasites display three distinct life cycles: sylvatic, zoonotic, and anthroponotic. In adapting to changed environmental conditions, including reduced non-human population and increased human population, some vectors display conversion from a primarily zoophyllic to primarily anthrophyllic orientation. Deforestation and ensuing changes in landuse, human settlement, commercial development, road construction, water control systems (dams, canals, irrigation systems, reservoirs), and climate, singly, and in combination have been accompanied by global increases in morbidity and mortality from emergent parasitic disease. The replacement of forests with crop farming, ranching, and raising small animals can create supportive habitats for parasites and their host vectors. When the land use of deforested areas changes, the pattern of human settlement is altered and habitat fragmentation may provide opportunities for exchange and transmission of parasites to the heretofore uninfected humans. Construction of water control projects can lead to shifts in such vector populations as snails and mosquitoes and their parasites. Construction of roads in previously inaccessible forested areas can lead to erosion, and stagnant ponds by blocking the flow of streams when the water rises during the rainy season. The combined effects of environmentally detrimental changes in local land use and alterations in global climate disrupt the natural ecosystem and can increase the risk of transmission of parasitic diseases to the human population.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

A parameter control method in reinforcement learning to rapidly follow unexpected environmental changes.

In order to rapidly follow unexpected environmental changes, we propose a parameter control method in reinforcement learning that changes each of learning parameters in appropriate directions. We determine each appropriate direction on the basis of relationships between behaviors and neuromodulators by considering an emergency as a key word. Computer experiments show that the agents using our proposed method could rapidly respond to unexpected environmental changes, not depending on either two reinforcement learning algorithms (Q-learning and actor-critic (AC) architecture) or two learning problems (discontinuous and continuous state-action problems).

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed2001

Changing environmental strategies over time: an empirical study of the steel industry in the United States.

This study investigates how environmental strategies change over time. We submit evidence from the US steel industry that firms have modified their strategies over time. We offer that US industry passed through three stages--cost minimization, cost-effective compliance, and beneficial environmental controls. We compare typologies of environmental strategies and choose that of C. Oliver as the most appropriate. We investigate how environmental strategies in the steel industry changed over time a 4-year period. We offer that a further understanding of Oliver's strategies may increase understanding of the relationship between business and government on environmental issues. One over-arching problem in our field is the need to adequately operationalize how firms change strategies and pass through different stages. We hope that our study will help future researchers and practitioners better articulate the concepts of environmental strategies over time. Our study focused on the steel industry in the United States. We chose the US steel industry as one of the major environmental actors in the United States. The United States Environmental Protection Agency ranks the iron and steel industry as the largest industrial source of toxic environmental contamination. We encourage researchers to evaluate and test our methodology and findings in other contexts--both in other nations and different industries.

Conservation of Natural Resources↗
PubMed2001

Human-caused environmental change: impacts on plant diversity and evolution.

Human-caused environmental changes are creating regional combinations of environmental conditions that, within the next 50 to 100 years, may fall outside the envelope within which many of the terrestrial plants of a region evolved. These environmental modifications might become a greater cause of global species extinction than direct habitat destruction. The environmental constraints undergoing human modification include levels of soil nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and pH, atmospheric CO(2), herbivore, pathogen, and predator densities, disturbance regimes, and climate. Extinction would occur because the physiologies, morphologies, and life histories of plants limit each species to being a superior competitor for a particular combination of environmental constraints. Changes in these constraints would favor a few species that would competitively displace many other species from a region. In the long-term, the "weedy" taxa that became the dominants of the novel conditions imposed by global change should become the progenitors of a series of new species that are progressively less weedy and better adapted to the new conditions. The relative importance of evolutionary versus community ecology responses to global environmental change would depend on the extent of regional and local recruitment limitation, and on whether the suite of human-imposed constraints were novel just regionally or on continental or global scales.

Biological Evolution↗