Community Nursing

"Community Health Nursing on the Rise"

Dr. Brisbois will discuss concepts related to Community Health Nursing, such as:

• What is Community/Public Health Nursing

• Shift to global health and importance of Global Citizenship

• How to access reliable health information

• Health literacy promotion

• Cultural Competence/Diversity 

• Health disparities

• Research methods 

• Fostering collaboration and partnership with liaison librarian

 with an exemplar in the UMass Dartmouth College of Nursing & Health Sciences.

"Using curiosity as an intellectual catalyst for change"

I'll share my story about how a spirit of inquiry and curiosity has led to a program of research focusing on reducing stigma when caring for individuals with substance use disorder.  My research program focuses on nursing education related role development and how we can address this stigma. 

Within this discussion I'll share the story of my journey from cranberry biologist to nurse scientist. Central to my story is the pivotal role that early access to a library played in sparking my intellectual curiosity and shaping my research career.

Civil & Environmental Engineering

"Overview of Civil & Environmental Engineering"

Dr. Zhang's research focuses on wastewater treatment, particularly in the clearing of contaminants, including such techniques as nanotechnology, biofilm, and activated sludge.  She has broad interests in renewable energy, biofilm properties, bioremediation, and more.  She has been involved in shaping undergraduate curriculum as well as program coordinator for graduate students.  Her overview will help us understand the focus and priorities of civil and environmental engineers as well as how they use and rely on library services and librarians.  

What is the structure of the field; what are the foundational ideas?  What are the big questions that this field is asking?  In what new directions is research in this science going?  How is research conducted in the field? What instrumentation is used? How is data captured?  

"Tackling Environmental Pollution Challenges: From the Nanoworld to the Community"

Environmental contamination, as the presence of harmful pollutants in the air, water, and soil, is one of the 21st century's challenges and a main threat to human health. Research topics from understanding the fate and transport of pollutants in the environment and understanding the behavior of new emerging pollutants to societal impacts of the contamination will be discussed in the presentation. The talk will introduce the audience to research in the environmental field, giving a higher-level overview of the scientific significance and broader impacts of the research. 

Fisheries Oceanography

"New Frontiers in Fisheries Science"

Fishery science was traditionally focused on single species population dynamics to achieve optimum yield. However, the effects of climate change on fishery productivity and efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change have accelerated the need for socio-ecological approaches. Traditional stock assessments that assume stationary productivity are no longer accurate for many species impacted by climate change. In response, recent stock assessments of New England groundfish identified ecosystem influences, like bottom temperature, Mid-Atlantic Cold Pool indices, and the Gulf Stream index, which have significant effects on recruitment, natural mortality, growth, and catchability of fisheries and surveys. These environmental effects are being used to standardize fishery and survey catch rates and as covariates in population dynamics models. Accounting for environmental drivers in stock assessment and fishery management can adapt to changing conditions, but fishery managers cannot completely mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Reducing emissions through the development of renewable energy may be the most effective strategy to mitigating the effects of climate change. However, offshore wind farms also effect fisheries through ecosystem changes and direct impacts on fishing. In response, fisheries research is pivoting to multi-scale socio-ecological studies to understand potential impacts on the ecosystem and fisheries. Pre-construction baseline surveys are ongoing and transitioning to construction or operation phase monitoring to detect impacts on all major ecosystem components, from plankton to whales. Fishery monitoring data designed to support stock assessment and fishery management are now being used to estimate economic impacts. These recent applications demonstrate how climate change and offshore wind farms have accelerated the development of marine spatial planning, ecological research at multiple scales, operational socioeconomic analyses, and ecosystem approaches to stock assessment and fishery management. 

"Knowledge co-production to improve management outcomes for the US summer flounder recreational fishery"

Ecosystem approaches to fisheries management recognize people as part of a socio-ecological system and consider links among environmental, economic, and societal goals for sustainability. Our work focuses on creating decision support tools that can quantify tradeoffs among these goals. As part of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council's Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management, we have been conducting a management strategy evaluation to compare options designed to reduce discarding in the recreational summer flounder fishery, to increase both harvest and recreational opportunities. Reducing regulatory discards within the recreational sector of the summer flounder fishery has been challenging, and there is uncertainty in how information about the status of the flounder population should be translated into changes to recreational fishing regulations.

Through a collaborative, stakeholder-driven, and science-based process, we have developed a framework that integrates a model of flounder population dynamics with an angler economic behavior model to understand how recreational behavior at the state level responds to changing regulations and flounder availability. We use this framework to assess the relative benefits of a set of alternatives for managing the recreational fishery, over a suite of biological, social, and economic performance metrics. Our results show there are management options that can do better at reducing discards and converting those discards into harvest while limiting risk to the summer flounder population. However, the relative performance of management options is variable at the state or regional level, with negative recreational satisfaction outcomes for some states compared to status quo even when overall fishery performance improves. These models and results can be used to directly inform recreational management and provide both strategic and tactical advice for a variety of management priorities. The ability to compute likely outcomes of management options at the state or regional level provides a pathway for explicitly considering distribution of benefits when making management choices.

Capstone

Citizen Science in Academic Libraries

This capstone features a combined program that begins with an interactive presentation of tiered options for getting your library involved in citizen science from the fantastic Dr. Caroline Nickerson followed by a discussion with UMass Dartmouth faculty on their work integrating citizen science into classrooms.

Dr. Nickerson works extensively with SciStarter, an organization which promotes and facilitates citizen science for both researchers and participants, particularly on resources and programming for their Library Network.  She's planned an interactive presentation with a tiered approach to getting involved, depending on the amount of time, money, and emphasis you're able to commit.  She'll talk about

• basics

• kits / outreach projects

• integration with faculty/course projects

She recommends exploring SciStarter's Free Citizen Science Training Modules as preparation for the capstone.

After two hours with Dr. Nickerson, we'll take citizen science into the instruction side of academic librarianship with a presentation from UMass Dartmouth faculty Dr. Kathryn Kavanagh and Dr. Stephen Witzig.  They recently received a grant for "Connecting Undergraduates to Biodiversity Instruction through Citizen Science (CUBICS)."

"Citizen Science in the Undergraduate Classroom:  Resources and Insights from the CUBICS grant"

We will introduce our workshop model for introducing citizen science to faculty to incorporate into their classes. We will also discuss citizen science resources available and provide insights from our CUBICS grant.