“Our study illustrated that summer precipitation, snow cover and elevation were all important drivers of revegetation success,” said Anne Nolin, a hydrologist and geography professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and formerly at Oregon State University. “In particular, we found that snow cover was a critical explanatory variable for revegetation in the Oregon and Washington Cascades. This could help inform revegetation management practices following severe wildfires.”

Climate change has already increased the fraction of winter precipitation that falls as rain rather than snow, reduced the spring snow water equivalent — a metric for how much water snow contains — and caused snowmelt to begin earlier in the spring than it used to, Nolin explained. Pacific Northwest snowpacks have seen the greatest declines of any seasonal snow region in the West.

The research, led by Nolin, examined the 260,000-square-mile Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest. She teamed with co-author Andrew Wilson, a graduate research assistant in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science, and co-author Kevin Bladon of OSU’s College of Forestry for the study.

The NASA-supported study featured before-and-after vegetation analyses for two dozen high-severity wildfires. The fires occurred over a 10-year period among the four distinct subregions of the Columbia River Basin. There are many short- and long-term effects from these fires, including erosion, debris flows and water quality issues, which can affect the health of aquatic ecosystems and downstream community water supply, highlighting the importance of understanding post-fire forest rehabilitation.

In their paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Biogeosciences, “Assessing the Role of Snow Cover for Post-Wildfire Revegetation Across the Pacific Northwest,” the findings show that given the trends of increasing wildfire activity, lower snowpacks, and earlier snow disappearance dates across the Pacific Northwest, forests will likely experience more frequent drought conditions, which will negatively impact the success of post?wildfire vegetation recovery with a number of impacts to the ecosystem.

“This knowledge may be used to facilitate adaptive post-fire management policies and decisions to ensure long-term forest health,” Nolin, who is also director of the University of Nevada, Reno’s Graduate Program of Hydrological Sciences, said. “For example, depending on the sub-region and species composition, reseeding efforts following low snow winters might employ more drought tolerant species or, replanting could be delayed one to two years until snowmelt and soil moisture conditions are more favorable for seedling propagation.

“However, climate change projections and shifting wildfire regimes have increased concerns about post-fire regeneration and, as such it is imperative that we broaden our understanding of the role of snowpacks in post-wildfire forest regeneration. The snowpacks’ role in aiding revegetation will become increasingly important across the West. And where snowpacks have declined, there likely will be ecosystem transitions that look like a shift from forest to non-forest and from evergreen to deciduous vegetation.”

Wildfires continue to burn more area each year across many regions of the planet, including the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest’s largest watershed, the Columbia River Basin contains a variety of fire-prone landscapes that have seen almost 900 fires since 2010, serves as critical habitat for more than 700 species and is a water source for seven states.

“As wildfire activity continues to increase and intensify in the Northwest, understanding what shapes revegetation on severely burned forested landscapes is vital for guiding management decisions,” co-author Bladon said.

After the occurrence of a wildfire, revegetation over the burned area is critical to maintain or re-establish ecosystem functions from forests such as biodiversity, erosion control, water purification and habitat provision.

“Snow matters to regrowing vegetation following fire, and with double impacts of declining snowpacks and increasing wildfires it is critical that we understand how these changes are affecting Pacific Northwest forests,” Nolin said. “Positive relationships between snow cover and summer precipitation with post-fire greening suggest that active post-fire revegetation efforts will help facilitate recovery, especially during years when severe wildfires are followed by early snowmelt years or below average summer precipitation.”

In the study, summer precipitation consistently appeared as the most important variable driving post-fire revegetation across all four subregions. Snow cover frequency, along with elevation, were shown to be secondary but significantly influential explanatory variables for revegetation in the Oregon and Washington Cascades.

More than 80% of wildfires in the western United States from 2000 to 2012 burned within a seasonal snow zone, a time period that overlaps with the years studied by the scientists.

“As wildfire activity continues to increase and intensify in the Northwest, understanding what shapes revegetation on severely burned forested landscapes is vital for guiding management decisions,” Bladon said. “But variables such as snow cover frequency, pre-fire forest composition, and elevation, were also shown to be significantly influential for revegetation in the Oregon and Washington Cascades.”

Wildfire season length in the western U.S. overall has increased by roughly 25 days in recent decades, including a massive increase in the Northwest from the mid-1970s, when it was 23 days, to 116 days in the early 2000s. That’s attributable mainly to warmer temperatures and drier conditions in the spring and summer.

“Snow cover has a strong influence on postfire vegetation greening, but the influence varied depending on subregion and dominant prefire conifer species, with the biggest impacts at low to moderate elevations in the Washington Cascades, the Oregon Cascades and western Montana Rockies,” Nolin said. “And with current climate change projections, snowpacks’ role in aiding revegetation will become increasingly important across the West.”

Bladon suggests fire can be looked at as an opportunity for forests to reassemble into ecosystems better suited to survive warmer winters, longer fire seasons and more drought stress.

“That’s at the heart of the challenge of reconciling a changing climate’s ecological forces with postfire forest management goals — the goals are often oriented toward re-establishing forests as they existed before the fire,” Bladon said. “But with shifting climate trends in the region, that might not be the most adaptive path forward for forested landscapes.”

The key, according to work by associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka at the UAF Geophysical Institute, is in the greatly reduced level of natural remanent magnetization of rock that has been subjected to the intense forces from a meteor as it nears and then strikes the surface.

Rocks unaltered by humanmade or non-Earth forces have 2% to 3% natural remanent magnetization, meaning they consist of that quantity of magnetic mineral grains — usually magnetite or hematite or both. Kletetschka found that samples collected at the Santa Fe Impact Structure in New Mexico contained less than 0.1% magnetism.

Kletetschka determined that plasma created at the moment of impact and a change in the behavior of electrons in the rocks’ atoms are the reasons for the minimal magnetism.

Kletetschka reported his findings in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Santa Fe Impact Structure was discovered in 2005 and is estimated to be about 1.2 billion years old. The site consists of easily recognized shatter cones, which are rocks with fantail features and radiating fracture lines. Shatter cones are believed to only form when a rock is subjected to a high-pressure, high-velocity shock wave such as from a meteor or nuclear explosion.

Kletetschka’s work will now allow researchers to determine an impact site before shatter cones are discovered and to better define the extent of known impact sites that have lost their craters due to erosion.

“When you have an impact, it’s at a tremendous velocity,” Kletetschka said. “And as soon as there is a contact with that velocity, there is a change of the kinetic energy into heat and vapor and plasma. A lot of people understand that there is heat, maybe some melting and evaporation, but people don’t think about plasma.”

Plasma is a gas in which atoms have been broken into free-floating negative electrons and positive ions.

“We were able to detect in the rocks that a plasma was created during the impact,” he said.

Earth’s magnetic field lines penetrate everything on the planet. Magnetic stability in rocks can be knocked out temporarily by a shock wave, as they are when hitting an object with a hammer, for example. The magnetic stability in rocks returns immediately after the shock wave passes.

At Santa Fe, the meteorite’s impact sent a massive shock wave through the rocks, as expected. Kletetschka found that the shock wave altered the characteristics of atoms in the rocks by modifying the orbits of certain electrons, leading to their loss of magnetism.

The modification of the atoms would allow for a quick remagnetization of the rocks, but Kletetschka also found that the meteorite impact had weakened the magnetic field in the area. There was no way for the rocks to regain their 2% to 3% magnetism even though they had the capability to do so.

That’s because of the presence of plasma in the rocks at the impact surface and below. Presence of the plasma increased the rocks’ electrical conductivity as they converted to vapor and molten rock at the leading edge of the shock wave, temporarily weakening the ambient magnetic field.

“This plasma will shield the magnetic field away, and therefore the rock finds only a very small field, a residue,” Kletetschka said.

Kletetschka is also affiliated with Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Charles University students Radana Kavkova and Hakan Ucar assisted in the research.

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In the new study, climate scientist Andra Garner at Rowan University analyzed more than 35,000 computer-simulated storms. To assess likely storm outcomes in the future, Garner and her collaborators compared where storms formed, how fast they moved and where they ended from the pre-industrial period through the end of the 21^st century.

The researchers found that future East Coast hurricanes will likely cause greater damage than storms of the past. The research predicted that a greater number of future hurricanes will form near the East Coast, and those storms will reach the Northeast corridor more quickly. The simulated storms slow to a crawl as they approach the East Coast, allowing them to produce more wind, rain, floods, and related damage in the Northeast region. The longest-lived tropical storms are predicted to be twice as long as storms today.

The study was published in Earth’s Future, which publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

The changes in storm speed will be driven by changes in atmospheric patterns over the Atlantic, prompted by warmer air temperatures. While Garner and her colleagues note that more research remains to be done to fully understand the relationship between a warming climate and changing storm tracks, they noted that potential northward shifts in the region where Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds meet or slowing environmental wind speeds could be to blame.

“When you think of a hurricane moving along the East Coast, there are larger scale wind patterns that generally help push them back out to sea,” Garner said. “We see those winds slowing down over time.” Without those winds, the hurricanes can overstay their welcome on the coast.

Garner, whose previous work focused on the devastating East Coast effects of storms like Hurricane Sandy, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, said the concern raised by the new study is that more storms capable of producing damage levels similar to Sandy are likely.

And the longer storms linger, the worse they can be, she said.

“Think of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 sitting over Texas, and Hurricane Dorian in 2019 over the Bahamas,” she said. “That prolonged exposure can worsen the impacts.”

From 2010 to 2020, U.S. coastlines were hit by 19 tropical cyclones that qualified as billion-dollar disasters, generating approximately $480 billion in damages, adjusted for inflation. If storms sit over coasts for longer stretches, that economic damage is likely to increase as well. For the authors, that provides clear economic motivation to stem rising greenhouse gas emissions.

“The work produced yet more evidence of a dire need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases now to stop the climate warming,” Garner said.

Co-author Benjamin Horton, who specializes in sea-level rise and leads the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, said, “This study suggests that climate change will play a long-term role in increasing the strength of storms along the east coast of the United States and elsewhere. Planning for how to mitigate the impact of major storms must take this into account.”

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“As a surgeon, I am most excited about using measurements collected with osseosurface electronics to someday provide my patients with individualized orthopedic care — with the goal of accelerating rehabilitation and maximizing function after traumatic injuries,” said study co-senior author Dr. David Margolis, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery in the UArizona College of Medicine — Tucson and orthopedic surgeon at Banner — University Medical Center Tucson.

Fragility fractures associated with conditions like osteoporosis account for more days spent in the hospital than heart attacks, breast cancer or prostate cancer. Although not yet tested or approved for use in humans, the wireless bone devices could one day be used not only to monitor health, but to improve it, said study co-senior author Philipp Gutruf, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and Craig M. Berge faculty fellow in the College of Engineering.

“Being able to monitor the health of the musculoskeletal system is super important,” said Gutruf, who is also a member of the university’s BIO5 Institute. “With this interface, you basically have a computer on the bone. This technology platform allows us to create investigative tools for scientists to discover how the musculoskeletal system works and to use the information gathered to benefit recovery and therapy.”

Because muscles are so close to bones and move so frequently, it is important that the device be thin enough to avoid irritating surrounding tissue or becoming dislodged, Gutruf explained.

“The device’s thin structure, roughly as thick as a sheet of paper, means it can conform to the curvature of the bone, forming a tight interface,” said Alex Burton, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering and co-first author of the study. “They also do not need a battery. This is possible using a power casting and communication method called near-field communication, or NFC, which is also used in smartphones for contactless pay.”

Ceramic Adhesive Grows to Bone

The outer layers of bones shed and renew just like the outer layers of skin. So, if a traditional adhesive was used to attach something to the bone, it would fall off after just a few months. To address this challenge, study co-author and BIO5 Institute member John Szivek — a professor of orthopedic surgery and biomedical engineering — developed an adhesive that contains calcium particles with an atomic structure similar to bone cells, which is used as to secure osseosurface electronics to the bone.

“The bone basically thinks the device is part of it, and grows to the sensor itself,” Gutruf said. “This allows it to form a permanent bond to the bone and take measurements over long periods of time.”

For instance, a doctor could attach the device to a broken or fractured bone to monitor the healing process. This could be particularly helpful in patients with conditions such as osteoporosis, since they frequently suffer refractures. Knowing how quickly and how well the bone is healing could also inform clinical treatment decisions, such as when to remove temporary hardware like plates, rods or screws.

Some patients are prescribed drugs designed to speed up bone healing or improve bone density, but these prescriptions can have side effects. Close bone monitoring would allow physicians to make more informed decisions about drug dosage levels.

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Materials provided by University of Arizona College of Engineering. Original written by Emily Dieckman. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

LSU Maya archaeologist Heather McKillop and her team have excavated salt kitchens where brine was boiled in clay pots over fires in pole and thatch buildings preserved in oxygen-free sediment below the sea floor in Belize. But where these salt workers lived has been elusive, leaving possible interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or even inland. This gap left nagging questions about the organization of production and distribution.

New findings on the organization of the salt industry to supply this basic dietary commodity to inland cities during the Classic Maya civilization are reported in a recent article by McKillop and LSU alumna Cory Sills, who is an associate professor at University Texas-Tyler. The article “Briquetage and brine: Living and Working at the Ek Way Nal Salt Works, Belize” was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

McKillop and Sills began this new project in search of residences where the salt workers lived and to understand the energetics of production of salt with funding from the National Science Foundation. Although field work at Ek Way Nal, where the Paynes Creek Saltworks is located, has been postponed since March 2020 due to the pandemic, the researchers turned to material previously exported for study in the LSU Archaeology lab, including hundreds of wood samples from pole and thatch buildings, as well as pottery sherds.

“The Archaeology lab looks like a Tupperware party, with hundreds of plastic containers of water, but they are keeping the wood samples wet so they don’t dry out and deteriorate,” said McKillop, who is the Thomas & Lillian Landrum Alumni Professor in the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology.

She explained the strategy to continue research in the lab: “I decided to submit a wood post sample for radiocarbon dating from each building at Ek Way Nal to see if they all dated to the same time, which was suggested by the visibility of artifacts and buildings on the sea floor.”

When the dates started coming in, two at a time, McKillop identified a building construction sequence that began in the Late Classic at the height of Maya civilization and continued through the Terminal Classic when the dynastic leaders of inland city states were losing control and eventually the cities were abandoned by A.D. 900.

According to McKillop, “Using the well-studied site, Sacapulas, Guatemala, as a model, worked well to develop archaeological expectations for different activities for brine boiling in a salt kitchen, a residence and other activities, including salting fish.”

In the Ancient Mesoamerica article, they report a 3-part building construction sequence with salt kitchens, at least one residence and an outdoor area where fish were salted and dried. The archeologists’ strategy of radiocarbon dating each building had produced a finer grain chronology for Ek Way Nal that they are using for more sites.

The new analysis verifies McKillop’s estimate that 10 salt kitchens were in production at a time at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, which she reported in her book “Maya Salt Works” (2019, University Press of Florida).

“The research underscores the importance of radiocarbon dating each pole and thatch building at the salt works in order to evaluate production capacity of this dietary necessity. The research also shows the value of individually mapping artifacts and posts on the sea floor at the underwater sites in order to interpret building use. Using Sacapulas salt works as a model from which to develop archaeological correlates fits with Ek Way Nal and suggests the Maya living permanently at the community were engaged in surplus household production of salt that was well integrated in the regional economy, allowing them to acquire a variety of nonlocal goods,” she said.

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The findings, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, ultimately may lead to more personalized clinical practices and trainings for therapists to help maximize their therapeutic impact and improve patient outcomes.

“Research has tended to focus on the contributions of the patient or treatment type to therapy outcomes, which makes sense in a lot of ways, but unfortunately the therapist contribution has been somewhat neglected,” says lead author Alice Coyne, now a post-doctoral researcher at Case Western Reserve University and a Ph.D. graduate of UMass Amherst. “Our current trainings, which are often standardized across therapists, tend not to promote consistent improvements in patient outcomes. Instead, we believe that personalizing training to therapists’ unique strengths and weaknesses could enhance training outcomes down the line.”

Working with co-author Michael Constantino, professor of clinical psychology and director of the Psychotherapy Research Lab at UMass Amherst, Coyne initially conducted the research as part of her Ph.D. dissertation, which received the 2020 dissertation award from the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration.

“Her work is the first of its kind, and it will blaze a trail in our field,” Constantino predicts.

As her dissertation’s first aim, Coyne was interested in testing the prediction that patients experience more symptomatic and functional improvement in psychotherapy when a higher-quality patient-therapist alliance exists, as well as when the patient has a more positive expectation for change.

For the second aim, Coyne was interested in seeing if these associations differed based on who the therapist is. “A given technique in the hands of one therapist may look very different than that same technique in the hands of another therapist,” Coyne says. “To put it simply, one therapist may use their relationship with their patients as a key means to facilitate improvement; whereas for another therapist, their relationships with patients may be less important for patient improvement than their use of other strategies, such as cultivating positive expectations for change.”

Finally, for the third aim, Coyne looked at whether certain therapist characteristics predict which therapists tend to use relationship and belief processes to more therapeutic benefit across their caseloads.

To test these questions, the researchers analyzed data from 212 adults who were treated by 42 psychotherapists as part of a randomized trial that compared case-assignment methods in community-based mental health care. Throughout treatment, which varied in length and type, patients repeatedly completed surveys that measured their alliance quality with the therapist and their expectations for improvement.

Coyne and Constantino correctly hypothesized that, in general, better alliance quality and more positive outcome expectation associated with better treatment outcomes. Also, as predicted, therapists exhibited different strengths and weaknesses in their use of relationship and belief processes.

Finally, there was preliminary support that the therapists who used the alliance most effectively to promote patient improvement are the ones “… who are humbler in assessing their own alliance-fostering abilities,” the paper states.

Humbly know thyself may be one helpful takeaway from the research. “If you learn the things that you do particularly well as a therapist, then you can tailor your practice and play to your strengths,” Coyne says.