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New rehabilitation clinicians entering the workforce need mentorship. In developing countries, occupational, physical and speech therapists often request mentorship from multiple disciplines due to the lack of trained clinicians and that mentorship can be difficult to obtain. In Guyana, South America and in Ghana, West Africa, the source for occupational therapy mentorship must be from other countries because the occupational therapists are the first in their respective countries. In Morocco, the first class of occupational therapists will graduate in June 2020; therefore they will also be in need of mentorship and the current physiotherapists benefit from interdisciplinary mentorship in order to provide holistic treatment to patients. An International Interprofessional Mentorship program was created in order to provide these therapists with the mentorship they need. To date, therapists have joined the mentorship sessions from Botswana, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Topic requests from the participating clinicians vary from how to communicate with children with autism to neurodevelopmental treatment. Currently, once or twice a month, the clinicians participate in an hour webinar that includes a 45 minute presentation followed by a 15 minute question and answer session. Presenters are experienced clinicians from different disciplines, such as occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language pathologists presenting within their area of expertise. Clinicians are also encouraged to ask any mentoring questions they have about their current caseload. This mentorship program is sustainable due to its organizational design and negligible costs. In addition to the founder and chair, there are 2 co-vice chairs responsible for its success, such as recruiting presenters, supporting the clinicians and hosting the presentations. This model is easily transferable to any organization and is especially relevant for large hospital networks that have access to multiple trainers. The major requirement for success is reliable internet access. Online mentoring has already been implemented in many healthcare disciplines with benefits reported in the ease of implementation and lower costs associated (De Witt Jansen, 2018; Lewiecki, et al., 2017; Westervelt et al., 2018). In a study examining online mentoring using the ECHO© (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) Model, the participants reported the greatest strength of the program was the inclusion of multiple disciplines in the online community (De Witt Jansen, 2018). International online mentoring has also been studied in both physiotherapy and nursing with positive results, emphasizing the removal of barriers, such as cost, access to mentorship and continuing education (Westervelt et al., 2018). Online mentoring for medical professionals in underserved and rural areas has also been shown to provide a community of support that helps to prevent professional isolation and keep clinicians in those areas up to date on research developments (Lewiecki, et al., 2017). The biggest lesson learned thus far is that the organizers need to express the importance of tailoring presentations to an audience that is extremely limited in resources. The presenters need to be prepared for questions on alternative equipment and supplies that may be readily available in their work environment.

Passive acoustic sensing has emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity, especially for echolocating bat species. To better assess bat population trends there is a critical need for accurate, reliable, and open source tools that allow the detection and classification of bat calls in large collections of audio recordings. The majority of existing tools are commercial or have focused on the species classification task, neglecting the important problem of first localizing echolocation calls in audio which is particularly problematic in noisy recordings. We developed a convolutional neural network based open-source pipeline for detecting ultrasonic, full-spectrum, search-phase calls produced by echolocating bats. Our deep learning algorithms were trained on full-spectrum ultrasonic audio collected along road-transects across Europe and labelled by citizen scientists from www.batdetective.org. When compared to other existing algorithms and commercial systems, we show significantly higher detection performance of search-phase echolocation calls with our test sets. As an example application, we ran our detection pipeline on bat monitoring data collected over five years from Jersey (UK), and compared results to a widely-used commercial system. Our detection pipeline can be used for the automatic detection and monitoring of bat populations, and further facilitates their use as indicator species on a large scale. Our proposed pipeline makes only a small number of bat specific design decisions, and with appropriate training data it could be applied to detecting other species in audio. A crucial novelty of our work is showing that with careful, non-trivial, design and implementation considerations, state-of-the-art deep learning methods can be used for accurate and efficient monitoring in audio., Author summary There is a critical need for robust and accurate tools to scale up biodiversity monitoring and to manage the impact of anthropogenic change. For example, the monitoring of bat species and their population dynamics can act as an important indicator of ecosystem health as they are particularly sensitive to habitat conversion and climate change. In this work we propose a fully automatic and efficient method for detecting bat echolocation calls in noisy audio recordings. We show that our approach is more accurate compared to existing algorithms and other commercial tools. Our method enables us to automatically estimate bat activity from multi-year, large-scale, audio monitoring programmes.

© 2016 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Urbanization is a key global driver in the modification of land use and has been linked to population declines even in widespread and relatively common species. Cities comprise a complex assortment of habitat types yet we know relatively little about the effects of their composition and spatial configuration on species distribution. Although many bat species exploit human resources, the majority of species are negatively impacted by urbanization. Here, we use data from the National Bat Monitoring Programme, a long-running citizen science scheme, to assess how two cryptic European bat species respond to the urban landscape. A total of 124 × 1 km2 sites throughout Britain were surveyed. The landscape surrounding each site was mapped and classified into discrete biotope types (e.g., woodland). Generalized linear models were used to assess differences in the response to the urban environment between the two species, and which landscape factors were associated with the distributions of P. pipistrellus and P. pygmaeus. The relative prevalence of P. pygmaeus compared to P. pipistrellus was greater in urban landscapes with a higher density of rivers and lakes, whereas P. pipistrellus was frequently detected in landscapes comprising a high proportion of green space (e.g., parklands). Although P. pipistrellus is thought to be well adapted to the urban landscape, we found a strong negative response to urbanization at a relatively local scale (1 km), whilst P. pygmaeus was detected more regularly in wooded urban landscapes containing freshwater. These results show differential habitat use at a landscape scale of two morphologically similar species, indicating that cryptic species may respond differently to anthropogenic disturbance. Even species considered relatively common and well adapted to the urban landscape may respond negatively to the built environment highlighting the future challenges involved in maintaining biodiversity within an increasingly urbanized world.

Action to reduce anthropogenic impact on the environment and species within it will be most effective when targeted towards activities that have the greatest impact on biodiversity. To do this effectively we need to better understand the relative importance of different activities and how they drive changes in species’ populations. Here, we present a novel, flexible framework that reviews evidence for the relative importance of these drivers of change and uses it to explain recent alterations in species’ populations. We review drivers of change across four hundred species sampled from a broad range of taxonomic groups in the UK. We found that species’ population change (~1970–2012) has been most strongly impacted by intensive management of agricultural land and by climatic change. The impact of the former was primarily deleterious, whereas the impact of climatic change to date has been more mixed. Findings were similar across the three major taxonomic groups assessed (insects, vascular plants and vertebrates). In general, the way a habitat was managed had a greater impact than changes in its extent, which accords with the relatively small changes in the areas occupied by different habitats during our study period, compared to substantial changes in habitat management. Of the drivers classified as conservation measures, low-intensity management of agricultural land and habitat creation had the greatest impact. Our framework could be used to assess the relative importance of drivers at a range of scales to better inform our policy and management decisions. Furthermore, by scoring the quality of evidence, this framework helps us identify research gaps and needs.