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Knowledge products comprise assessments of authoritative information supported by standards, governance, quality control, data, tools, and capacity building mechanisms. Considerable resources are dedicated to developing and maintaining knowledge products for biodiversity conservation, and they are widely used to inform policy and advise decision makers and practitioners. However, the financial cost of delivering this information is largely undocumented. We evaluated the costs and funding sources for developing and maintaining four global biodiversity and conservation knowledge products: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Protected Planet, and the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas. These are secondary data sets, built on primary data collected by extensive networks of expert contributors worldwide. We estimate that US$160 million (range: US$116-204 million), plus 293 person-years of volunteer time (range: 278-308 person-years) valued at US$ 14 million (range US$12-16 million), were invested in these four knowledge products between 1979 and 2013. More than half of this financing was provided through philanthropy, and nearly three-quarters was spent on personnel costs. The estimated annual cost of maintaining data and platforms for three of these knowledge products (excluding the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems for which annual costs were not possible to estimate for 2013) is US$6.5 million in total (range: US$6.2-6.7 million). We estimated that an additional US$114 million will be needed to reach pre-defined baselines of data coverage for all the four knowledge products, and that once achieved, annual maintenance costs will be approximately US$12 million. These costs are much lower than those to maintain many other, similarly important, global knowledge products. Ensuring that biodiversity and conservation knowledge products are sufficiently up to date, comprehensive and accurate is fundamental to inform decision-making for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Thus, the development and implementation of plans for sustainable long-term financing for them is critical.

In 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) outlined an international strategic plan, which included the twenty Aichi Biodiversity Targets to be met by 2020. Target 12 refers to preventing extinctions and halting species declines. Despite some local conservation successes, this target is not on track to be met at the global level. We aimed to understand what is needed to achieve this target according to two invested but contrasting groups: species conservation experts and global conservation policy makers. We surveyed a diversity of species conservation experts and contrasted their views with those of policy makers engaged with CBD. Species experts considered that the greatest need was for increased political will, while policy makers most frequently cited the need for increased knowledge of species conservation status. Both groups did, however, emphasise that achieving species conservation targets requires greater progress to be made towards many of the other Aichi Targets. We suggest that improved communication, collaboration and data sharing among institutions should be a priority to help overcome the perceived knowledge-gap. Doing so could help to align the views of practitioners and policy makers, and develop a shared understanding of the key actions needed to accelerate progress towards global biodiversity targets.

At this book's core is the fundamental belief that teacher quality is the single most important factor in student learning. It shows you how to improve your students' academic achievement by focusing on what teachers know and are able to do. This brief handbook serves as a practical tool which provides professional growth benchmarks for aspiring and practicing teachers; a framework to use when hiring new teachers; common language for dialogues on learning and for teacher evaluation; and a clearer focus on professional development. Six Standards of Practice is presented in simple, practical, classroom-oriented terms. Also displayed are rubrics which reveal and distinguish \"emerging\", \"developing\", \"proficient\", and \"advanced\" practices.

Using data for 25,780 species categorized on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, we present an assessment of the status of the world's vertebrates. One-fifth of species are classified as Threatened, and we show that this figure is increasing: On average, 52 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians move one category closer to extinction each year. However, this overall pattern conceals the impact of conservation successes, and we show that the rate of deterioration would have been at least one-fifth again as much in the absence of these. Nonetheless, current conservation efforts remain insufficient to offset the main drivers of biodiversity loss in these groups: agricultural expansion, logging, overexploitation, and invasive alien species.

IntroductionToronto Community Housing (City of Toronto owned), provides housing for 60,000 low-income households in over 100 neighbourhoods. There are more than 14,000 senior tenants in 83 seniors-designated buildings. A process to build an integrated service model to support seniors in these buildings is underway, however the COVID 19 pandemic exposed their increased vulnerability, isolation and limited access to primary care. Recognizing the need to respond quickly, the North Toronto Ontario Health Team (organizations including primary care, hospital, community and home-care) partnered with the Seniors Housing Unit in North Toronto to provide onsite primary care services to 1800 tenants.Aims Objectives Theory or MethodsAim: To improve access to primary care in Toronto Community Housing through an on-site clinic, outreach and virtual connections to primary care.Methods: Participating primary care providers were assigned 1-4 buildings. An onsite clinic was established in each building. A registered health care professional worked with onsite community agencies to identify those at risk or in need of primary care services, provide advice/counselling, and connect seniors virtually to their family physician. A family physician dedicated to the building completed home-visits in the building for those unattached to primary care. All residents were offered both influenza and covid vaccinations on site.Highlights or Results or Key FindingsA diverse group of health and social service providers joined together in March 2020 to develop a process for connecting with nine seniors’ buildings to identify and provide needed supplies and services. Key support and leadership was provided by Baycrest Health Sciences Centre. On-site clinics were established, a communication strategy and manual and toolkit were created. Building huddles and cross-building huddles occurred weekly to share and problem solve. Both influenza and COVID 19 vaccines were administered to the residents at their doorstep, addressing vaccine hesitancy.COVID-19 case incidence curve was significantly less than the overall City of Toronto. Rate of hospitalization from COVID-19 decreased by 30% in the 9 buildings by April 30, 2020 compared to the overall City of Toronto. Two of the nine buildings have continued to provide on-site and in-home primary care post COVID 19 vaccination. Key success factors will be discussed.ConclusionsCross sector collaboration is an efficient and effective way to address urgent needs in low-income seniors housing. Strong leadership as well as co-developed processes, frequent building meetings and cross-building huddles were effective ways of sharing innovative ways of meeting needs with limited resources.Implications for applicability/transferability sustainability and limitationsWhile building an integrated service model to support seniors in Toronto’s low-income housing buildings is underway, the COVID 19 pandemic response in North Toronto allowed for quick collaboration and strategy testing to ensure vulnerable seniors have timely access to primary care. Lessons learned are transferrable to other communities of seniors.

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will probably include a goal to stabilize and restore the status of species. Its delivery would be facilitated by making the actions required to halt and reverse species loss spatially explicit. Here, we develop a species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric that is scalable across species, threats and geographies. STAR quantifies the contributions that abating threats and restoring habitats in specific places offer towards reducing extinction risk. While every nation can contribute towards halting biodiversity loss, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Madagascar and Brazil combined have stewardship over 31% of total STAR values for terrestrial amphibians, birds and mammals. Among actions, sustainable crop production and forestry dominate, contributing 41% of total STAR values for these taxonomic groups. Key Biodiversity Areas cover 9% of the terrestrial surface but capture 47% of STAR values. STAR could support governmental and non-state actors in quantifying their contributions to meeting science-based species targets within the framework. The species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric quantifies the contributions that abating threats and restoring habitats offer towards reducing species’ extinction risk in specific places.

City of Toronto owned Toronto Seniors Housing Corporation (TCHC) provides housing for 15,000 low-income seniors in 83 seniors-designated buildings across Toronto. The North Toronto Ontario Health Team (including primary care, hospital, community, home-care) partnered with Toronto Senior Housing to develop and implement a Neighbourhood Care Team (NCT) integrated model to address tenants' health and social needs, co-designed with the  tenants. Central to the model is a multi-modal tenant engagement strategy to tailor health and social services to tenants’ needs. This engagement identified inconsistent access to family physicians. One NCT objective is to increase primary care provider connections. Identifying unattached or poorly attached tenants included door to door surveys to engage tenants regarding their barriers and the services and supports most meaningful to them, multi-organization immunization clinics with wellness checks and assistance with accessing dental and foot care, and biweekly NCT huddles. Our team worked with each tenant with inadequate or no access to primary care in order to: 1.Strengthen attachments through video connections with the tenant’s family physician 2.Provide assistance with transportation to appointments 3.Connect tenants to local family physicians accepting patients 4.Identify family physicians speaking the tenant’s language and facilitate attachment 5.Provide on-site primary care for more vulnerable tenants with complex needs. On-site primary care included monthly primary care clinics by a regular family physician and a monthly nursing clinic for blood pressure checks, foot care, assistance accessing care for all tenants. The clinics were in an equipped clinical space in the building and home visits were provided for homebound patients, including those requiring palliative care. The unattached clinic has been very well attended and highly valued by the tenants. Tenant needs that required wider interprofessional and housing team members included: 1.Medication access and compliance 2.Cognitive impairment and/or low health literacy 3.Adequate nutrition 4.Hoarding/pest infestations Barriers to providing care and achieving health outcomes included: 1.Social resources: Poor or no family connections 2.Communication: Language, access and/or ability to use phone, ability to receive messages, few use email 3.Ability to follow a simple plan – eg. Go to pharmacy, go to lab, notify team if problems 4.Ability to navigate government programs for assistance 5.Transportation and navigation to get to appointments 6.Finances Opportunities to improve access to primary care for more vulnerable tenants include: Engaging local pharmacists to call team when a tenant is not picking up their medications Engagement of tenants’ family physicians to reach out to our team for assistance connecting to their patients, supporting their care Multi sectoral interprofessional team helped to understand and address care needs holistically Working with hospitals to identify unattached TCH building patients prior to discharge and confirming attachment if family physician identified. A collaborative multi-sector integrated team (primary care, community and home care, and housing) used a range of communication strategies and co-designed the approach with tenants to provide on-site primary care to assist more vulnerable tenants at risk for hospitalization and poor health outcomes.

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect bottom-up perceptual processes (e.g., McClelland & Elman, 1986). While robust influences on phoneme perception have been reported in multiple studies (Connine & Clifton, 1987; Ganong, 1980; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008; Pitt & Samuel, 1993; among others), some phonetic contrasts, particularly those that distinguish place of articulation, have been tested in very limited circumstances. Furthermore, there is little research testing this phenomenon with impoverished stimuli or under poor listening conditions, where interaction from lexical processes in phoneme perception may increase, provided that bottom-up input is sufficient to activate higher-level processes. To determine the extent of lexical influences in perception, or the “lexical identification shift” (Pitt & Samuel, 1993) with previously untested stimuli in non-degraded and spectrally-degraded conditions, a series of experiments analogous to Ganong’s (1980) paradigm were conducted. The first study investigated top-down influences in phoneme perception, including the contribution of coarticulation cues, in normal hearing adults. In the second study, the lexical identification shift was examined in multiple levels of spectral degradation with noise-vocoded (NV) speech. These experiments illustrate the interplay between top-down and bottom-up information in speech perception; specifically, the influence of top-down knowledge in identification of place-of-articulation contrasts, and the impact of spectral degradation on perception in these tasks. Results in the first study revealed a significant lexical identification shift with place-of-articulation phonetic contrasts across three separate experiments, providing further support for lexical interaction in speech perception. These results also established the contribution of coarticulatory information in relation to the lexical shift, which increased substantially with both a full continuum of stimuli and stimuli that are substantially more categorical. Mixed results were obtained in the second study, with a significant lexical identification shift in the 20-channel NV condition, and no significant differences in phoneme categorization with lexically-biased continua in undistorted, 10-channel and 16-channel NV conditions. Furthermore, the lexical shift was smaller in the 20-channel NV condition, compared to shifts observed in the first study that did not include spectrally-degraded stimuli. Overall, outcomes indicate that lexical influence in the perception of stop consonant place-of-articulation phonetic contrasts is restrained by spectrally-degraded input, with evidence of this restraint apparent in conditions with relatively low-levels of distortion.

Thorne Waste, S. Yorkshire, is a large raised bog, subject to extensive commercial peat extraction, which retains some re-flooded, revegetated peat cuttings. The composition of the vegetation of some of these cuttings (96 sampled quadrats, each of 25 m2) has been related to a number of environmental variables. Revegetation sequences in the abandoned cuttings (all less than 60 years old and with less than 20 cm peat infill) were established by stratigraphical analyses. In some cuttings a basal layer of ericaceous peat apparently marks temporarily drier conditions preceding deeper inundation. Some former mire species (e.g. Sphagnum imbricatum) have not survived the peat-cutting period even on uncut surfaces (baulks) but these have been much drained and burnt. The revegetated cuttings contained species typical of poor-fen (e.g. Carex curta) as well as of ombrotrophic mires (e.g. Andromeda polifolia); chemical analyses indicated weakly minerotrophic peat water. This may favour such species as Sphagnum recurvum. There was no indication of chemical enrichment from inflow from surrounding farmland, from underlying mineral ground or from the clay-lined canals excavated across the bog. Release of cations following drainage and re-flooding may provide some explanation. Only soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) concentration in peat water samples showed consistent and significant seasonal variation, with the lowest values in summer. There were also only a few consistent differences in water chemistry amongst most of the vegetation units identified by TWINSPAN. Nodum 4 (Eriophorum-Sphagnum) stands (richest in ombrotrophic species) occupied the least minerotrophic conditions. One cutting, dominated by Juncus effusus, had no ombrotrophic species (nodum 6). Water concentrations of Ca2+, Na+, K+, NH4 +, SO4 2-and SRP were significantly larger here than in other cuttings and peat fertility (estimated phytometrically) and K, N and P concentrations in peat extracts were significantly greater than in a Sphagnum-dominated cutting. The J. effusus samples had strong negative loadings on axis 2 of a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of the floristic data; concentrations of NH4 +, Na+and SO4 2-in the water showed significant negative correlation with axis 2 ordination scores. Seasonal fluctuation of water level was similar in most cuttings (the J. effusus cutting was exceptional) but variation in depth relative to the peat surface (caused by excavation to different depths) was related to floristic variation. PCA axis 1 may reflect a water-table gradient with TWINSPAN noda 2 (Calluna-Sphagnum recurvum) and particularly 1 (Pteridium-Campylopus) occupying drier conditions than the others. The wetter cuttings (except the J. effusus site) supported most ombrotrophic and poor-fen species. They were not readily segregated into discrete vegetation types and the two TWINSPAN classes (noda 3 and 4) that accommodated them showed much overlap on the PCA ordination. Nodum 4 samples tended to have higher loadings on PCA axis 2 and to be more species-rich than nodum 3 samples. Species-richness was strongly positively correlated with PCA axis 2. This may reflect, in part, stand maturity, vegetation with most species having been disturbed least recently.