Creating a culture of caring: A collaborative academic-practice approach to clinical education.

Strong academic and practice partnerships are needed in the ever-changing health care environment. Sometimes an invisible barrier exists between clinical practice and academia; academic-practice partnerships are a way to bridge this barrier. Since 2008a team-based model of clinical education known as the Culture of Caring (COC) has brought together three academic institutions with a large hospital system to develop a unified clinical experience and curriculum that improves the student, provider, and patient experience. In the COC model the team consists of academic-practice leaders, clinical instructors, staff nurses, and students. Together they engage in a structured curriculum that is integrated into both the clinical environment and the academic setting. Each week of clinical the students focus on a topic that is paired with journal articles and learning activities that allow the team to engage in learning that is applicable to the clinical practice environment. The learning activities allow students to engage in learning about evidence-based practice and quality improvement initiatives that are taking place on the unit. The implementation of this collaborative approach to a clinical nursing education model has had a positive impact on the working relationships between the academic partners and clinical practice leaders.

Spatially explicit modeling of 1992-2100 land cover and forest stand age for the conterminous United States.

Information on future land-use and land-cover (LULC) change is needed to analyze the impact of LULC change on ecological processes. The U.S. Geological Survey has produced spatially explicit, thematically detailed LULC projections for the conterminous United States. Four qualitative and quantitative scenarios of LULC change were developed, with characteristics consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES). The four quantified scenarios (A1B, A2, B1, and B2) served as input to the forecasting scenarios of land-use change (FORE-SCE) model. Four spatially explicit data sets consistent with scenario storylines were produced for the conterminous United States, with annual LULC maps from 1992 through 2100. The future projections are characterized by a loss of natural land covers in most scenarios, with corresponding expansion of anthropogenic land uses. Along with the loss of natural land covers, remaining natural land covers experience increased fragmentation under most scenarios, with only the B2 scenario remaining relatively stable in both the proportion of remaining natural land covers and basic fragmentation measures. Forest stand age was also modeled. By 2100, scenarios and ecoregions with heavy forest cutting had relatively lower mean stand ages compared to those with less forest cutting. Stand ages differed substantially between unprotected and protected forest lands, as well as between different forest classes. The modeled data were compared to the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) and other data sources to assess model characteristics. The consistent, spatially explicit, and thematically detailed LULC projections and the associated forest stand-age data layers have been used to analyze LULC impacts on carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, biodiversity, climate and weather variability, hydrologic change, and other ecological processes.