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The article offers information on the aspects of limnology in the U.S. from 1930 to 1990, focusing on the works by ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson and University of Wisconsin-Madison limnology head Arthur Davis Hasler. It offers brief profiles of Hutchinson and Hasler including their education, career in limnology, and their research in ecology topics. Other topics include their graduate students and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.

During the Spring Semester of 2020, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS‐CoV‐2) and the illnesses it caused (COVID‐19) led to widespread cancelling of on‐campus instruction at colleges and universities in the United States and other countries around the world. Response to the pandemic in university settings included a rapid and unexpected shift to online learning for faculty and students. The transition to teaching and learning online posed many challenges, and the experiences of students during this crisis may inform future planning for distance learning experiences during the ongoing pandemic and beyond. Herein, we discuss the experiences of first‐ and second‐year university students enrolled in a biology seminar course as their classes migrated to online environments. Drawing on reported student experiences and prior research and resources, we discuss the ways we will adjust our own teaching for future iterations of the course while offering recommendations for instructors tasked with teaching in online environments. This manuscript is an essay that draws on reported student experiences and prior research and resources during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Responses were used to provide methods or to intrinsically and extrinsically motivating students during their online learning experience as well as ways for educators to assess student needs and make course adjustments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We surveyed ecologists and evolutionary biologists in American universities to understand how they are coping with the COVID‐19 pandemic. Female respondents, assistant professors, and those who care for at least one child or teenager, were significantly more dissatisfied with their work–life balance during this pandemic than others, and further expected these negative impacts to be long lived. Online teaching support, relaxed expectations on publications, the possibility of pausing the tenure clock, and an acknowledgment of "no business as usual" by administrators were thought to be effective policies in mitigating these negative impacts. This survey serves as a manifesto to what our professional community is currently experiencing, and should be used to inform academic policies directed at improving faculty productivity and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Researchers have linked geographic disparities in obesity to community-level characteristics, yet many prior observational studies have ignored temporality and potential for bias.Methods: Repeated cross-sectional data were used from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) (2003-2012) to examine the influence of county-level characteristics (active commuting, unemployment, percentage of limited-service restaurants and convenience stores) on BMI. Each exposure was calculated using mean values over the 5-year period prior to BMI measurement; values were standardized; and then variables were decomposed into (1) county means from 2003 to 2012 and (2) county-mean-centered values for each year. Cross-sectional (between-county) and longitudinal (within-county) associations were estimated using a random-effects within-between model, adjusting for individual characteristics, survey method, and year, with nested random intercepts for county-years within counties within states.Results: A negative between-county association for active commuting (β = -0.19; 95% CI: -0.23 to -0.16) and positive associations for unemployment (β = 0.17; 95% CI: 0.14 to 0.19) and limited-service restaurants (β = 0.13; 95% CI: 0.11 to 0.14) were observed. An SD increase in active commuting within counties was associated with a 0.51-kg/m2 (95% CI: -0.72 to -0.31) decrease in BMI over time.Conclusions: These results suggest that community-level characteristics play an important role in shaping geographic disparities in BMI between and within communities over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the important role of schools in the food environment faced by children, most research examining access to healthy food has focused on the retail sector. We create a database of school menus and the nutritional information about each item on the menu from nearly all school districts in the United States to examine the influence of the school‐based food environment on the nutritional choices of children. Using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS), we find that, holding constant the neighborhood retail food environment, exposure to healthier meals at school increases the healthfulness of foods acquired by children throughout the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To describe the variation across neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in missed nursing care in disproportionately black and non-black-serving hospitals. To analyze the nursing factors associated with missing nursing care.Data Sources/study Setting: Survey of random samples of licensed nurses in four large U.S. states.Study Design: This was a retrospective, secondary analysis of 1,037 staff nurses in 134 NICUs classified into three groups based on their percent of infants of black race. Measures included the average patient load, individual nurses' patient loads, professional nursing characteristics, nurse work environment, and nursing care missed on the last shift.Data Collection: Survey data from a Multi-State Nursing Care and Patient Safety Study were analyzed (39 percent response rate).Principal Findings: The patient-to-nurse ratio was significantly higher in high-black hospitals. Nurses in high-black NICUs missed nearly 50 percent more nursing care than in low-black NICUs. Lower nurse staffing (an additional patient per nurse) significantly increased the odds of missed care, while better practice environments decreased the odds.Conclusions: Nurses in high-black NICUs face inadequate staffing. They are more likely to miss required nursing care. Improving staffing and workloads may improve the quality of care for the infants born in high-black hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development has received increasing attention in recent literature, driven by increased environmental concerns. We study the influence of green initiatives and green performance on financial performance for the top 500 publicly traded companies in the USA by industry sector. Green initiatives are measured using the concepts Green Pay Link, Sustainability Themed Committee and Audit. Green performance is measured using Energy Productivity, Carbon Productivity, Water Productivity, Waste Productivity and Green Reputation. The results show that green initiatives have a negative impact on Energy Productivity and Green Reputation, and that both green initiatives and green performance have a significant impact on financial performance. These results are mixed and vary by industry sector. The results suggest that companies take a reactive, not proactive, approach in the implementation of green initiatives. In addition, the results suggest that the impact of green performance on financial performance is not immediate, and may take more than a year for companies to observe. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To examine the relationship between Magnet recognition, an indicator of nursing excellence, and patients' experience with their hospitalization reported in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey.Data Sources: This secondary analysis includes cross-sectional data from the 2010 HCAHPS survey, the American Hospital Association, and the American Nurses Credentialing Center.Study Design: We conducted a retrospective observational study.Data Collection: Using common hospital identifiers, we created a matched set of 212 Magnet hospitals and 212 non-Magnet hospitals.Principal Findings: Patients in Magnet hospitals gave their hospitals higher overall ratings, were more likely to recommend their hospital, and reported more positive care experiences with nurse communication.Conclusions: Magnet recognition is associated with better patient care experiences, which may positively enhance reimbursement for hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farming, including family farming, is now dominated by vertically controlled operations that deplete the soil, pollute water, and produce food designed more to satisfy marketing requirements than human nutritional needs. Agricultural practices today are a result of abdicating control over our lives to a thoroughly industrialized culture, in which institutions are governed by the single criterion of efficiency--finding least-cost solutions. Standardization is a major part of that process. But living systems cannot be standardized. They require diversity and some degree of redundancy to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In the cultural contest between the machine and the garden, the machine has definitely won, but if we do not make room for the garden again, our victory will be our own funeral. New Agrarianism seeks to encourage diversity of species on each farm and across farms within entire landscapes. But farmers cannot carry out the restoration of ecologically-oriented agriculture on their own. They need support from cities: 1) in the form of markets to sell locally-grown produce at prices that will support their work, 2) in a new understanding of ecosystems that focuses on inhabited spaces and not just wilderness, and 3) in an orientation that questions whether efficiency should be the paramount value of our culture. Finally, the transition to more biologically-diverse human settlements can come about only if economic incentives are modified to remove the unrelenting pressure on farmers to expand their operations or go out of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenology, the timing of cyclical and seasonal natural phenomena such as flowering and leaf out, is an integral part of ecological systems with impacts on human activities like environmental management, tourism, and agriculture. As a result, there are numerous potential applications for actionable predictions of when phenological events will occur. However, despite the availability of phenological data with large spatial, temporal, and taxonomic extents, and numerous phenology models, there have been no automated species‐level forecasts of plant phenology. This is due in part to the challenges of building a system that integrates large volumes of climate observations and forecasts, uses that data to fit models and make predictions for large numbers of species, and consistently disseminates the results of these forecasts in interpretable ways. Here, we describe a new near‐term phenology‐forecasting system that makes predictions for the timing of budburst, flowers, ripe fruit, and fall colors for 78 species across the United States up to 6 months in advance and is updated every four days. We use the lessons learned in developing this system to provide guidance developing large‐scale near‐term ecological forecast systems more generally, to help advance the use of automated forecasting in ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microbes contained within free‐living organisms can alter host growth, reproduction, and interactions with the environment. In turn, processes occurring at larger scales determine the local biotic and abiotic environment of each host that may affect the diversity and composition of the microbiome community. Here, we examine variation in the diversity and composition of the foliar fungal microbiome in the grass host, Andropogon gerardii, across four mesic prairies in the central United States. Composition of fungal endophyte communities differed among sites and among individuals within a site, but was not consistently affected by experimental manipulation of nutrient supply to hosts (A. gerardii) or herbivore reduction via fencing. In contrast, mean fungal diversity was similar among sites but was limited by total plant biomass at the plot scale. Our work demonstrates that distributed experiments motivated by ecological theory are a powerful tool to unravel the multiscale processes governing microbial community composition and diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]