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Assessing the patterns of wildlife attendance to specific areas is relevant across many fundamental and applied ecological studies, particularly when animals are at risk of being exposed to stressors within or outside the boundaries of those areas. Marine mammals are increasingly being exposed to human activities that may cause behavioral and physiological changes, including military exercises using active sonars. Assessment of the population‐level consequences of anthropogenic disturbance requires robust and efficient tools to quantify the levels of aggregate exposure for individuals in a population over biologically relevant time frames. We propose a discrete‐space, continuous‐time approach to estimate individual transition rates across the boundaries of an area of interest, informed by telemetry data collected with uncertainty. The approach allows inferring the effect of stressors on transition rates, the progressive return to baseline movement patterns, and any difference among individuals. We apply the modeling framework to telemetry data from Blainville's beaked whale (Mesoplodon densirostris) tagged in the Bahamas at the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), an area used by the U.S. Navy for fleet readiness training. We show that transition rates changed as a result of exposure to sonar exercises in the area, reflecting an avoidance response. Our approach supports the assessment of the aggregate exposure of individuals to sonar and the resulting population‐level consequences. The approach has potential applications across many applied and fundamental problems where telemetry data are used to characterize animal occurrence within specific areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of the latest calibrations of the CLUES model for each of total nitrogen, total phosphorus and Escherichia coli. The model provides estimates of in-stream annual loads of these contaminants for every river reach in the New Zealand River Environments Classification and has been used in New Zealand for catchment planning and policy development. CLUES has been calibrated nationally against loads estimated from data collected from water quality monitoring stations located across the country which could lead to parameter bias. To ascertain whether there is any systematic bias, the calibration residuals were evaluated against regional (geographical) location and a range of upstream catchment characteristics, namely land use, soil drainage properties, slope, network order, proportion of baseflow in total stream flow, climate, geology and source of flow. We found that CLUES gives reasonable load estimates at the catchment scale (Nash-Sutcliff efficiencies >0.8 for all the contaminants). However, there was significant uncertainty in the parameterisation. While several significant relationships were found between upstream catchment characteristics and the model residuals, these relationships were weak and are unlikely to point to any systematic bias in the calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: We present a study that provides a contemporary view of alcohol-related injury prevalence amongst patients presenting to a New Zealand (NZ) emergency department (ED).Methods: Adult injury patients presenting to Auckland City Hospital ED within 6 h of injury were invited to participate during three recruitment periods (2015-2016). An interviewer-administered questionnaire obtained information on demographic, injury, general health, and lifestyle factors. Breath alcohol samples were obtained. Descriptive and logistic regression analyses were conducted.Results: 501 patients participated (71% response rate), 21% had consumed alcohol within 6 h of their injury. The majority were male, and overall falls were the most common mechanism of injury among all patients. Alcohol-related injuries most commonly occurred at home, and were significantly more likely to occur during the weekend (Friday-Sunday) and night hours (23:00-06:59). After controlling for the effects of confounding; 'poor' general health, engaging in leisure activities at the time of injury, and injuries resulting from assaults were associated with increasing the odds of alcohol-related injury.Conclusions: Acute alcohol use continues to play a considerable role in ED injury presentations in NZ. Continued policy, health promotion, and injury prevention efforts are required to reduce the harms associated with alcohol use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosis and prognosis of cancer are informed by the architecture inherent in cancer patient tissue sections. This architecture is typically identified by pathologists, yet advances in computational image analysis facilitate quantitative assessment of this structure. In this article, we develop a spatial point process approach to describe patterns in cell distribution within tissue samples taken from colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. In particular, our approach is centered on the Palm intensity function. This leads to taking an approximate-likelihood technique in fitting point processes models. We consider two Neyman-Scott point processes and a void process, fitting these point process models to the CRC patient data. We find that the parameter estimates of these models may be used to quantify the spatial arrangement of cells. Importantly, we observe characteristic differences in the spatial arrangement of cells between patients who died from CRC and those alive at follow up., (© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)