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COVID-19 emerged in November 2019 leading to a global pandemic that has not only resulted in widespread medical complications and loss of life, but has also impacted global economies and transformed daily life. The current rapid response study in a convenience online sample quickly recruited 2,065 participants across the United States, Canada, and Europe in late March and early April 2020. Cross-sectional findings indicated elevated anxiety and depressive symptoms compared to historical norms, which were positively associated with COVID-19 concern more strongly than epidemiological data signifying risk (e.g., world and country confirmed cases). Employment loss was positively associated with greater depressive symptoms and COVID-19 concern, and depressive symptoms and COVID-19 concern were significantly associated with more stringent self-quarantine behavior. The rapid collection of data during the early phase of this pandemic is limited by under-representation of non-White and middle age and older adults. Nevertheless, these findings have implications for interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 infection.

Wrist-worn smart watches and fitness monitors (ie, wearables) have become widely adopted by consumers and are gaining increased attention from researchers for their potential contribution to naturalistic digital measurement of health in a scalable, mobile, and unobtrusive way. Various studies have examined the accuracy of these devices in controlled laboratory settings (eg, treadmill and stationary bike); however, no studies have investigated the heart rate accuracy of wearables during a continuous and ecologically valid 24-hour period of actual consumer device use conditions. The aim of this study was to determine the heart rate accuracy of 2 popular wearable devices, the Apple Watch 3 and Fitbit Charge 2, as compared with the gold standard reference method, an ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG), during consumer device use conditions in an individual. Data were collected across 5 daily conditions, including sitting, walking, running, activities of daily living (ADL; eg, chores, brushing teeth), and sleeping. One participant, (first author; 29-year-old Caucasian male) completed a 24-hour ecologically valid protocol by wearing 2 popular wrist wearable devices (Apple Watch 3 and Fitbit Charge 2). In addition, an ambulatory ECG (Vrije Universiteit Ambulatory Monitoring System) was used as the gold standard reference method, which resulted in the collection of 102,740 individual heartbeats. A single-subject design was used to keep all variables constant except for wearable devices while providing a rapid response design to provide initial assessment of wearable accuracy for allowing the research cycle to keep pace with technological advancements. Accuracy of these devices compared with the gold standard ECG was assessed using mean error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percent error. These data were supplemented with Bland-Altman analyses and concordance class correlation to assess agreement between devices. The Apple Watch 3 and Fitbit Charge 2 were generally highly accurate across the 24-hour condition. Specifically, the Apple Watch 3 had a mean difference of -1.80 beats per minute (bpm), a mean absolute error percent of 5.86%, and a mean agreement of 95% when compared with the ECG across 24 hours. The Fitbit Charge 2 had a mean difference of -3.47 bpm, a mean absolute error of 5.96%, and a mean agreement of 91% when compared with the ECG across 24 hours. These findings varied by condition. The Apple Watch 3 and the Fitbit Charge 2 provided acceptable heart rate accuracy (<±10%) across the 24 hour and during each activity, except for the Apple Watch 3 during the daily activities condition. Overall, these findings provide preliminary support that these devices appear to be useful for implementing ambulatory measurement of cardiac activity in research studies, especially those where the specific advantages of these methods (eg, scalability, low participant burden) are particularly suited to the population or research question.

Researchers have increasingly begun to use consumer wearables or wrist-worn smartwatches and fitness monitors for measurement of cardiovascular psychophysiological processes related to mental and physical health outcomes. These devices have strong appeal because they allow for continuous, scalable, unobtrusive, and ecologically valid data collection of cardiac activity in “big data” studies. However, replicability and reproducibility may be hampered moving forward due to the lack of standardization of data collection and processing procedures, and inconsistent reporting of technological factors (e.g., device type, firmware versions, and sampling rate), biobehavioral variables (e.g., body mass index, wrist dominance and circumference), and participant demographic characteristics, such as skin tone, that may influence heart rate measurement. These limitations introduce unnecessary noise into measurement, which can cloud interpretation and generalizability of findings. This paper provides a brief overview of research using commercial wearable devices to measure heart rate, reviews literature on device accuracy, and outlines the challenges that non-standardized reporting pose for the field. We also discuss study design, technological, biobehavioral, and demographic factors that can impact the accuracy of the passive sensing of heart rate measurements, and provide guidelines and corresponding checklist handouts for future study data collection and design, data cleaning and processing, analysis, and reporting that may help ameliorate some of these barriers and inconsistencies in the literature.

The decline of wild Chinook salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ) in the Pacific Northwest is concerning due to their critical role in the culture, economy, and ecology of the region, and the endangered species status of some of the evolutionarily significant units. Decline in Chinook stocks has been partially attributed to increases in pinniped abundance. The northwest coast of Washington State, USA, provides year-round habitat to early marine-phase Chinook salmon from multiple stocks and habitat for increasingly abundant Steller sea lions ( Eumetopias jubatus ). We estimated the Chinook salmon biomass consumed by Steller sea lions along the northwest coast of Washington using diet data obtained via DNA metabarcoding from scat and a prey consumption model. Between December 2020 and August 2021, Steller sea lions consumed 284 metric tons (95% PI: 191–417 t) of Chinook salmon. A set of experimental models were used to estimate the consumption of age-0 Chinook salmon, and the base model estimated 146 t (95% PI: 93–221 t) of ocean age-0 Chinook—or approximately 2,064,418 (95% PI: 1,431,524–2,932,922) individual ocean age-0 Chinook— were consumed during the study period. While precise consumption values should be interpreted with caution due to high uncertainty highlighted by sensitivity analyses, our results suggest that Steller sea lions contribute to the low marine survival rates of early marine-phase Chinook salmon at a higher rate than previously estimated. The high uncertainty in model estimates, compounded by assumptions and limitations arising from data gaps, highlights the need for further research on both predator and prey populations in the region.

Background Smartphone-based digital mental health interventions (DMHI) have been described as a purported solution to meet growing healthcare demands and lack of providers, but studies often don’t account for whether patients are concurrently in another treatment modality. Methods This preregistered quasi-experimental intent-to-treat study with 354 patients enrolled in a therapist-supported DMHI examined the treatment effectiveness of the Meru Health Program (MHP) as a stand-alone treatment as compared to the MHP in combination with any other form of treatment, including (1) in-person therapy, (2) psychotropic medication use, and (3) in-person therapy and psychotropic medication use. Results Patients with higher baseline depressive and anxiety symptoms were more likely to self-select into multiple forms of treatment, an effect driven by patients in the MHP as adjunctive treatment to in-person therapy and psychotropic medication. Patients in combined treatments had significantly higher depressive and anxiety symptoms across treatment, but all treatment groups had similar decreasing depressive and anxiety symptom trajectories. Exploratory analyses revealed differential treatment outcomes across treatment combinations. Patients in the MHP in combination with another treatment had higher rates of major depressive episodes, psychiatric hospitalization, and attempted death by suicide at baseline. Conclusions Patients with higher depressive and anxiety symptoms tend to self-select into using DMHI in addition to more traditional types of treatment, rather than as a stand-alone intervention, and have more severe clinical characteristics. The use the MHP alone was associated with improvement at a similar rate to those with higher baseline symptoms who are in traditional treatments and use MHP adjunctively.

Pinniped populations around the world increased rapidly after hunting and culling during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ended. Some believe that pinnipeds are now preventing the recovery of certain fish populations, and that controlling pinniped population abundance using lethal measures such as harvesting or by non-lethal means like contraception could recover fish populations. It is unclear, however, how effective and how long it would take for such methods of population control to bring numbers of pinnipeds down to target levels. We used sex- and age-structured population models to estimate how quickly harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) abundance in British Columbia, Canada, could be reduced by 50%, through combinations of lethal removals and sterilization of adult females. Models were fit to seal abundance, demographic, and harvest data collected between 1879 and 2014. Simulation modeling suggests reliance on contraception exclusively is unlikely to reduce the current harbor seal population (numbering ~100,000) by 50% within 25 years, and would result in more variable outcomes, compared to lethal removals. Contraception could be combined with harvesting to maintain a target abundance of harbor seals (although captive studies with harbor seals are needed to confirm the efficacy of contraception). Our simulation modeling approach provides a useful framework to assess how non-lethal measures could be integrated into policies that promote active population control of harbor seal numbers.

Effective conservation of threatened populations requires identification of the processes limiting recovery. When multiple population processes are potentially limiting, they are sometimes analyzed independently, often using different datasets. Analytically, this is suboptimal, as processes are often correlated, which can lead to biased estimates of parameters and quantities of interest. Integrated population models (IPMs) can synthesize several data streams in the same probabilistic framework to circumvent these issues. Lack of prey was identified as one of the primary threats to recovery of critically endangered southern resident killer whales (SRKWs), Orcinus orca. Previous studies have correlated SRKW demographic rates with indices of Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha abundance, but these approaches have modeled reproduction and survival independently. We developed an IPM for SRKWs that models both processes simultaneously, as a function of Chinook salmon abundance along the west coast of North America. We used this model to evaluate the relationship between Chinook salmon abundance and demographic rates of SRKWs, with the goal of updating our understanding of a potential causal relationship between prey availability and SRKW population dynamics, and how these relationships may have changed over time. Results suggest that SRKW mortality rates are more strongly associated with Chinook salmon abundance than birth rates. Our analysis also suggests northern resident killer whale abundance could also be affecting SRKW carrying capacity, possibly through competition over shared prey resources. The IPM fit observed total abundance data well and predicted temporal changes in population demographics with reasonable accuracy, but small sample size may have opacified model selection. Our approach offers a valuable tool for predicting the response of the SRKW population to alternative management strategies involving the recovery of Chinook salmon stocks in the eastern Pacific.

We evaluated the ability of three leading LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Experimental, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to recognize human facial expression using the NimStim dataset. GPT and Gemini matched or exceeded human performance, especially for calm/neutral and surprise. All models showed strong agreement with ground truth, though fear was often misclassified. Findings underscore the growing socioemotional competence of LLMs and their potential for healthcare applications.

Understanding how protected species influence the population dynamics of each other is an essential part of ecosystem‐based management. Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) are critical prey for endangered southern resident killer whales (SRKWs; Orcinus orca), and increasing releases of hatchery Chinook salmon has been proposed to aid SRKW recovery. We analyzed 30 yr of data and found that density‐dependent survival of hatchery Chinook salmon released into the central and southern parts of the Salish Sea (Washington, USA; and British Columbia, Canada) may be associated with the presence of naturally produced pink salmon (O. gorbuscha), which are highly abundant as juveniles only in even‐numbered years. We first modeled hatchery Chinook salmon marine survival as a function of the numbers of juvenile Chinook released and the presence of emigrating juvenile pink salmon between 1983 and 2012. Then, we related reconstructed numbers of hatchery Chinook salmon returning to Puget Sound to the abundance of juvenile Chinook released in even (pink emigration) and odd (non‐pink emigration) years from 1980 to 2010. We found that in some regions of the Salish Sea, both hatchery Chinook salmon marine survival and adult Chinook returns varied depending on the number of hatchery Chinook released and the presence of juvenile pink salmon. Specifically, in some regions survival of hatchery Chinook salmon decreased when greater numbers of juveniles were released into the Salish Sea in even years, when large numbers of pink salmon were present, but increased or remained stable when pink salmon were not present in large numbers (in odd years). This suggests lower, density‐dependent survival of juvenile Salish Sea Chinook salmon during even outmigration years. Our analyses suggest that scientists and managers should further investigate potential mechanisms for density‐dependent survival of hatchery Chinook salmon from Salish Sea hatcheries when designing strategies to maximize adult returns.

For over a century, hatchery programs have been used to subsidize natural salmon populations in order to increase fisheries opportunities and, more recently, to conserve declining natural populations. While an extensive literature has described the impacts of large‐scale hatchery operations on freshwater ecosystems, less attention has been given to ecosystem interactions within the marine environment. We analyzed records of hatchery‐released Chinook salmon in the Salish Sea to assess temporal and spatial changes in hatchery practices since 1950, with the goal of identifying potential implications for ecosystem dynamics and conservation efforts in the region. Over the past 65 yr, we found significant changes in the size and time at which juvenile salmon are released, resulting in decreased diversity of these traits. Research suggests that predation on juvenile salmon by other fish, avian, and marine mammal species could be size‐dependent, and our results indicate that current hatchery practices are releasing Chinook salmon in the size range preferred by these predators. With current marine survival rates at chronically low levels, and increasing demand for hatchery subsidies, it is important to consider how modifying existing hatchery programs intended to reduce homogenization may promote more natural marine food web dynamics, with potential benefits to both hatchery and natural Chinook populations.