Stakeholder Participation in Freshwater Monitoring and Evaluation Programs: Applying Thresholds of Potential Concern within Environmental Flows.

The complex nature of freshwater systems provides challenges for incorporating evidence-based techniques into management. This paper investigates the potential of participatory evidence-based techniques to involve local stakeholders and make decisions based on different "knowledge" sources within adaptive management programs. It focuses on the application of thresholds of potential concern (TPC) within strategic adaptive management (SAM) for facilitating inclusive decision-making. The study is based on the case of the Edward-Wakool (E-W) "Fish and Flows" SAM project in the Murray-Darling River Basin, Australia. We demonstrate the application of TPCs for improving collaborative decision-making within the E-W, associated with environmental watering requirements, and other natural resource management programs such as fish stocking. The development of TPCs in the E-W fish and flows SAM project helped improve stakeholder involvement and understanding of the system, and also the effectiveness of the implemented management interventions. TPCs ultimately helped inform environmental flow management activities. The TPC process complemented monitoring that was already occurring in the system and provided a mechanism for linking formal and informal knowledge to form explicit and measurable endpoints from objectives. The TPC process faced challenges due to the perceived reduction in scientific rigor within initial TPC development and use. However, TPCs must remain tangible to managers and other stakeholders, in order to aid in the implementation of adaptive management. Once accepted by stakeholders, over time TPCs should be reviewed and refined in order to increase their scientific rigor, as new information is generated.

Using videovoice methods to enhance community outreach and engagement for the National Children's Study.

The National Children's Study (NCS) is a prospective observational study examining the effects of environmental influences on child health and development in the United States. Videovoice is a health advocacy and promotion methodology wherein participants use participatory videography and interviewing techniques to identify issues of concern, communicate knowledge, and advocate for community health. This study describes a videovoice project, implemented in six Cook County, IL, communities targeted by the NCS for participant recruitment. A 6-week, videovoice training was conducted to train and empower NCS community outreach and engagement personnel. Pre/post evaluations were administered, and participant footage was qualitatively analyzed to identify overarching themes informing future outreach. Participants reported significant increases (p < .05) in videography/photography skills, community outreach/communication abilities, and awareness of important community health issues. Major themes included the following: high community knowledge of local health issues, low community knowledge of the NCS, and identification of barriers to participation. Two promotional videos were created to address these barriers and educate communities about the NCS. A 6-week, videovoice project was effective in training NCS community outreach personnel and enhancing NCS community engagement within six target Cook County, IL, communities via the production of community-engaged NCS promotional videos.

Time-dependent changes of rod influence on hue perception.

Hue-naming was used in conjunction with a probe-flash procedure to determine the time-course of rod-mediated effects on hue appearance across the spectrum. Two types of rod influence on hue are distinguishable on the basis of differences in both spectral specificity and time course of effect: (1) a "faster" rod influence enhances green relative to red and (2) a "slower" rod influence enhances short-wavelength red relative to green and blue relative to yellow. The results show that there are separable rod hue biases that operate over different time courses and that the overall rod influence on hue appearance depends importantly on the temporal properties of the stimuli, presumably because rods interact in different ways with different portions of the neural pathways that mediate human color vision.