Towards future-oriented conservation: Managing protected areas in an era of climate change.

Management of protected areas must adapt to climate impacts, and prepare for ongoing ecological transformation. Future-Proofing Conservation is a dialogue-based, multi-stakeholder learning process that supports conservation managers to consider the implications of climate change for governance and management. It takes participants through a series of conceptual transitions to identify new management options that are robust to a range of possible biophysical futures, and steps that they can take now to prepare for ecological transformation. We outline the Future-Proofing Conservation process, and demonstrate its application in a pilot programme in Colombia. This process can be applied and adapted to a wide range of climate adaptation contexts, to support practitioners in developing positive ways forward for management and decision-making. By acknowledging scientific uncertainty, considering social values, and rethinking the rules that shape conservation governance, participants can identify new strategies towards "future-oriented conservation" over the long term.

The right hemisphere's contribution to discourse processing: A study in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: Discourse skills - in which the right hemisphere has an important role - enables verbal communication by selecting contextually relevant information and integrating it coherently to infer the correct meaning. However, language research in epilepsy has focused on single word analysis related mainly to left hemisphere processing. The purpose of this study was to investigate discourse abilities in patients with right lateralized medial temporal lobe epilepsy (RTLE) by comparing their performance to that of patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE). METHODS: 74 pharmacoresistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients were evaluated: 34 with RTLE and 40 with LTLE. Subjects underwent a battery of tests that measure comprehension and production of conversational and narrative discourse. Disease related variables and general neuropsychological data were evaluated. RESULTS: The RTLE group presented deficits in interictal conversational and narrative discourse, with a disintegrated speech, lack of categorization and misinterpretation of social meaning. LTLE group, on the other hand, showed a tendency to lower performance in logical-temporal sequencing. SIGNIFICANCE: RTLE patients showed discourse deficits which have been described in right hemisphere damaged patients due to other etiologies. Medial and anterior temporal lobe structures appear to link semantic, world knowledge, and social cognition associated areas to construct a contextually related coherent meaning.

Memory for emotional material in temporal lobe epilepsy.

Several studies suggest that highly emotional information could facilitate long-term memory encoding and consolidation processes via an amygdala-hippocampal network. Our aim was to assess emotional perception and episodic memory for emotionally arousing material in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) who are candidates for surgical treatment. We did this by using an audiovisual paradigm. Forty-six patients with medically resistant TLE (26 with left TLE and 20 with right TLE) and 19 healthy controls were assessed with a standard narrative test of emotional memory. The experimental task consisted of sequential picture slides with an accompanying narrative depicting a story that has an emotional central section. Subjects were asked to rate their emotional arousal reaction to each stimulus after the story was shown, while emotional memory (EM) was assessed a week later with a multiple choice questionnaire and a visual recognition task. Our results showed that ratings for emotional stimuli for the patients with TLE were significantly higher than for neutral stimuli (p=0.000). It was also observed that patients with TLE recalled significantly less information from each slide compared with controls, with a trend to lower scores on the questionnaire task for the group with LTLE, as well as poorer performance on the visual recognition task for the group with RLTE. Emotional memory was preserved in patients with RTLE despite having generally poorer memory performance compared with controls, while it was found to be impaired in patients with LTLE.

Episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in temporal lobe epilepsy.

Autobiographical memory (AM) is understood as the retrieval of personal experiences that occurred in specific time and space. To date, there is no consensus on the role of medial temporal lobe structures in AM. Therefore, we investigated AM in medial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients. Twenty TLE patients candidates for surgical treatment, 10 right (RTLE) and 10 left (LTLE), and 20 healthy controls were examined with a version of the Autobiographical Interview adapted to Spanish language. Episodic and semantic AM were analyzed during five life periods through two conditions: recall and specific probe. AM scores were compared with clinical and cognitive data. TLE patients showed lower performance in episodic AM than healthy controls, being significantly worst in RTLE group and after specific probe. In relation to semantic AM, LTLE retrieved higher amount of total semantic details compared to controls during recall, but not after specific probe. No significant differences were found between RTLE and LTLE, but a trend towards poorer performance in RTLE group was found. TLE patients obtained lower scores for adolescence period memories after specific probe. Our findings support the idea that the right hippocampus would play a more important role in episodic retrieval than the left, regardless of a temporal gradient.