G'day, May 40 here. Welcome back to 40 University. Welcome to Medical School. I'm reading this terrific book, The Loss of Sadness, How Psychiatry Transform Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Alan V Horwitz, a sociologist of medicine, and Jerome C. Wakefield, a historian of medicine, and just a brief shot from this book. So perhaps the most popular and widespread theory about depression is that it's a chemical imbalance in the brain. I remember when I was basically bedridden by chronic fatigue syndrome between ages 21 and 27. I think the most common thing suggestion that I heard was maybe if you ate meat, you'd feel better, and that was right. I think in retrospect that was right. If I had just eaten meat, I probably would have turned things around. But then the second most common thing I heard was, well, it may be just the chemical imbalance in your brain and you should try psychiatric medication because it just corrects the chemical imbalance in your brain. Well, we don't really have much evidence for this thesis. What you usually hear about is specifically deficient amounts of the neurochemical serotonin, and that's what causes depression. So let's pray for Josh Randall suffering from super low serotonin levels right now. So then drug treatments, they target serotonin. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, and these correct the chemical imbalance, and so this is the appropriate and the best way to treat depressive disorder. And this theory is just relentlessly promoted. Like pharmaceutical advertisements emphasize how correctable chemical imbalances cause depressive disorders. You've got public service messages that stress that depression stems from flaws in brain chemistry rather than in character. So don't be afraid to ask for pharmaceutical help. Then you've got mental health advocacy groups who share the message that depression is just a physical brain-based illness just like diabetes and asthma, man. So if you've got diabetes, you wouldn't turn down insulin, would you? Well, SSRIs are just like insulin for the depressed, right? What insulin is for the diabetic, SSRIs are for the depressed, right? That's what's pushed. And these messages are ubiquitous.  They are throughout. They are across our society. So there's this widespread impression that research has shown, like science has shown, guys, that chemical deficiencies are the cause of depressive disorders and drugs work because they correct these chemical deficiencies in the neurotransmission system. So you can separate depressive disorders, right? In DD, major depressive disorder, right? It's the most common psychiatric diagnosis from normal sadness. You just have to examine the levels of serotonin in the brain, bro, right? And where did this chemical deficiency theory of depression originate? With the good psychiatrist, your friend and mine, Joseph Scheidelkraut, he published this hypothesis in 1965 that low levels of amines were associated with the development of depressive disorder. And so we all know what amines are, right? It's an organic compound derived from ammonia, by replacement of one or more hydrogen atoms by organic groups. Boy, I'm so ashamed that I just cheated my way through chemistry. It was the only way I passed that class in high school. But I didn't call it cheating. I called it taking advantage of the surroundings. It shows my low levels of character. In some situations, I have low levels of character. So Dr. Joseph Scheidelkraut's hypothesis published in 1965. His paper is still one of the most frequently cited articles in the whole history of psychiatry. Now, he thought that norinephrine, not serotonin, was the neurochemical implicated in depressive disorder. So what is the evidence for the chemical deficiency hypothesis that stems from the purportive success of drug treatments, which raise levels of amines and alleviate depression symptoms a little better than just placebo effect? So Dr. Scheidelkraut recognized that even if the drugs are effective in treating the disorders, that does not necessarily imply that their mode of action involves correction of the underlying abnormality. But there are all these arguments relating to serotonin that rely on the premise that if we just enhance its transmission, we can improve depression. Because a deficiency in the serotonin system is responsible for the emergence of depression. But this theory has so many problems. So one is that SSRIs cause immediate changes in the levels of serotonin, but the resulting effects on depression, there are positive effects. They take a month or two to transpire. So you immediately get a boost in serotonin, but you don't feel any better for a month or two, if ever. So the impact of the drugs on depression might not result from the change in neurotransmitter levels that they create, but from another number of other processes associated with amine activity. So another problem with this theory is that drugs do not affect either serotonin or nephrin. So some drugs don't affect either. And these are the major amines involved in the chemical imbalance hypothesis. But these drugs still can alleviate depression just as much as the ones that do affect serotonin levels. So there are all these antidepressant drugs developed after SSRIs, but they don't boost serotonin. Now the third difficulty is that drugs use to treat depression work with equal effectiveness on other disorders, including anxiety, eating disorder, attention deficit disorder, substance abuse, personality disorders. And a whole host of other conditions that may or may not be comorbid with depression. So drugs are not correcting a specific neurochemical abnormality in the brain that underlies depression. So they're acting on general brain functions in ways that influence many different behavioral and emotional systems. So there's no theory that explains how a single abnormality in brain chemistry can be related to such a wide range of resulting problems. And only 25% of depressed patients actually have low levels of norenephrine or serotonin. Only 25%. Another problem is that these lower levels of serotonin among the 25% with depression do have these lower levels. These lower levels may very well be the consequences rather than the causes of depression. So there's no evidence that demonstrates that chemical imbalances precede and cause depression. So depression itself, as well as the drugs used to treat it, they will be responsible for these inferred deficiencies in serotonin levels. So most research participants with regard to psychiatric medication and depression have long histories of medication treatment. So it's impossible to know what their unmedicated brains look like before they begin using antidepressant drugs. And there's no adequate contextually grounded standard that exists for normal versus disordered levels of serotonin or other amines. We don't know what's an appropriate or proper or ordered level. So high or low levels of any neurochemical may not be abnormal in themselves. They may only relate, they may be contingent, meaning dependent upon a particular set of circumstances and to the way the brain is biologically designed to respond to those circumstances such as circumstances of loss, loss of income, loss of status, loss of a spouse, loss of connection, loss of community, loss of a job. So the brain mechanisms that underlie levels of serotonin and other neurochemicals probably biologically designed, evolutionarily developed to be responsive to a particular context. The brains of normal people who are experiencing serious loss, you'd expect them to show these same depleted levels of serotonin. And serotonin levels among primates vary substantially as a function of situation, situationism, situationism rules, social situation essentially determines or has a huge influence on your serotonin levels and your happiness and whether or not you are exhibiting symptoms of depression. So as you gain in status, you will behave in a more happy and confident manner. As you fall in status, you will behave in a more depressed manner. So gains and losses of social status correlate with rising and falling levels of serotonin. So low levels of serotonin in humans can reflect the emotions that normally accompany a recent negative change in social status rather than some major depressive disorder. So baboons living in the wild show highly elevated levels of glucocorticoid stress hormones after experiencing bereavement or loss of social status or other stressful events and these levels return to normal after the affected animals resume grooming behaviors with other members of their social network. So in many cases, these extreme levels of neurochemical imbalance do not indicate any disorder but instead show the way that normal brains respond to stressful situations. Also disorder states are associated not with extreme levels of neurochemicals alone but also with extreme levels that are inappropriate responses to an environmental context. So the sort of changes that you get in the brain result from depressive disorders basically the same as the responses in a normal person responding to stress. So the amount of serotonin or amine in response to some stressful event may well be adaptive to the situation in which it occurs. So the difference between what is a normal and abnormal neurochemicals lies not in the levels of the neurotransmitters per se but in fact the neurotransmitter level has escaped from the usual restraints and become chronic and removed from environmental circumstances. So statements that depression is a flaw in chemistry that it's a physical disease premature. It may be cognitive causes, psychodynamic, social, all sorts of other factors that may disrupt biologically designed sadness reactions that may or may not correlate with brain abnormalities. So the truth is it's not known how drugs alleviate the symptoms of mental disorders and it cannot be assumed they do so by correcting endogenous chemical deficiencies. One thing I find fascinating is how animals show all the same symptoms and behaviors of extreme sadness that human beings do and for similar reasons. So Charles Darwin noted that apes and humans show similar facial expressions in situations associated with sadness including elevated eyebrows, drooping eyelids, horizontal wrinkles across the forehead, outward extension and drawing down on the lips. So displays of sadness among apes like human responses include decreased locomotor activity, agitation, slouched or fetal like position, cessation of playing around and social withdrawal. It's pretty much the same among apes as among humans and lost situations that lead to depressive responses are similar in primates as they are in humans. So non-human primates react to separation from intimates, for example an infant monkey separated from its mother with physiological responses similar to those that correlate with sadness in humans including elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, like hormone impairments, impairments of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Non-human primates that are separated from their sexual partners or peers show similar reactions to human beings, similar reactions of loss and symptoms of depression that develop after separation with primates and with humans these symptoms rapidly disappear when the situation of loss is resolved such as when an infant is reunited with its mother. Primates in environments that feature readily available mother substitutes rarely exhibit severe and enduring reactions to maternal separation. Any mum in a port, any partner's dorm. So usually our quote unquote major depressive disorder symptoms are transient sadness responses to separation or loss. They're just part of innate coping mechanisms among many species including humans and apes. Now prolonged separation, separations marked by profound isolation produce among apes, animals, humans, neuro anatomical changes that may permanently affect both human and non-human brain functioning. And this is essentially the triggering of genuine depressive disorder about humans and apes. So non-human primates share with human social hierarchies with high and low status positions. Situations of chronic social subordination lead to behaviour on brain reactions similar to normal depressive responses in humans. So subordinate non-human primates have higher levels than dominance of stress hormones and lower levels of blood serotonin that neurochemical link to depression among humans. The loss of rank among non-human primates in their social hierarchies triggers the production of the neurochemical correlates of depression. So there are all these similarities between primates, non-human primates and human primates. So we can see how normal depressive symptoms are frequently just a function of social situation. They are a function of situation. Situationism guys, it's so useful in understanding the world. The situation will determine our brain chemistry, our quote-unquote personality, right? The big five personality traits we're outgoing or introverted, conscientious, lacking conscientiousness, agreeable or disagreeable. Much of that simply reflects the situation. So non-human primates tend to possess strong and enduring hierarchical status relationships with one dominant male in each group. And the highest ranking males among non-human primates have serotonin levels that are twice as high as those of other males in the group. And when experimenters withdrew the dominant males from the group, their serotonin levels fell, right?  You're going to likely refuse food. You're going to show diminished activity.  Now, the serotonin levels are previously dependent and low status monkeys who suddenly gain high status after removal of the previous dominant male apes. These previously low status monkeys rise, right? And they rise in status, they rise in serotonin levels. And they get the serotonin levels characteristic of dominant males. And similar results are obtained with female monkeys. So wild baboons living freely in East Africa, setting them shows a chronic social subordination is associated with high stress hormones consistent with depressive symptoms in humans. And when rank in status hierarchies changes, these physiological profiles change as well. So these physiological profiles, these brain chemistry profiles are heavily dependent upon social context on situation. So the behavioral and the neurochemical advantages of high rank are found only in stable dominant hierarchies. In unstable hierarchies in which the position of the dominant is precarious, high rank is not associated with fewer stress hormones. So humans have inherited from their primate ancestors a natural tendency to become sad in particular contexts of status and relationship loss. And this human tendency to become sad appears early in infancy. So way before the infant has ever learned culturally appropriate ways of expressing sadness. Infants and designs need strong attachment and they develop certain types of sadness responses as a coping mechanism when they are separated from their primary caregivers. So healthy infants who are separated from their mothers initially react by crying and other expressions of despair. They protest the separation. They search for their mothers. Their responses usually evoke sympathy from the mothers who respond by attending to the infant's needs. Now when the separations are prolonged, the infants start to withdraw. This is what happened to me when my mother was dying of cancer and I was put through foster care. Like the separation between me and my mother and me and my mother figures became prolonged. Now I withdrew. I became inactive. I became apathetic. I showed all the symptoms of an intense adult loss response. So prolonged separations from your caregiver and infants results in a state of attachment in which young children cease to respond to parental figures even after they are restored to their lives. So sadness naturally arises in infants, in non-human primates after the loss of close attachments. So we all will experience separation anxiety and grief when we lose intense loving relationships. So sadness that develops after the loss of these intense loving relationships is a normal pre-socialized aspect of human behavior and non-human behavior. When these losses are prolonged without any compensating remedies they can lead to responses that go way beyond normal sadness to become, you can call them depressive disorders or dysfunction. Bye-bye.


Our last speaker for this morning is Seth Jones. Seth is a fishing and wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at North Dakota Ecological Service Field Office. He received his bachelor's degree in zoology from North Dakota State University in 2017 and his master's degree in NRM from NDSU in 2021 where he conducted research on wetland conditions and plant community composition in the prairie pothole region. Seth's talk is cool season invasive grasses driving compositions of prairie pothole region wetlands. So let's welcome Seth. All right, well, thank you guys for the introduction. Can you, everybody hear me all right? Okay, well, Esben kind of stole my joke about my voice putting people to sleep, but yeah. So today I'm gonna be talking about some of my grad school research that I conducted here at NDSU. First off, I wanna give a special thanks to everybody who helped me out with this research. So Dr. Keiser, Brea and Cammie and then NDSU just for providing me all the resources I needed along the way in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for funding this research. So I'm just gonna jump straight into the study objectives. So first off, we just want to provide some insight onto the overall plant community composition of temporary and seasonal wetlands on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service feed title lands. So the entire study was done on feed title lands. We wanted to see what species were occurring on the landscape, what were our most abundant species, what were our most commonly found species. And then we wanted to look in a little bit more detail at those plant communities and determine what the overall drivers of those plant communities were. So looking at those patterns within the plant communities to see what's actually driving change within those wetland plant communities. And lastly, we just wanted to provide a base of information that could be used to help assist U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for their future adaptive management plans and specifically if they plan for adaptive management plans for their wetlands in the near future, hopefully with all the data that we collected from this that'll provide a good base for that management plan. So everybody here is probably pretty familiar with the Prairie Pothole region, makes up a pretty significant portion of the Northern Great Plains formed during the last glacial retreat and now characterized by millions of relatively small depressional wetlands on the landscape. Those wetlands are broken down into what we call our wetland classifications. That includes anything from ephemeral wetlands which aren't necessarily considered wetlands all the way up to our permanently potted wetlands. For this, we are just looking at temporary and seasonal wetlands. Those temporary wetlands are pretty small wetlands ranging from anywhere from a couple meters across all the way up to around an acre.  Temporary wetlands tend to only be inundated by water into the spring and maybe for several days after heavy rainfall events. They are known for having two vegetation zones and the seasonal wetlands, they'll be inundated by water well into the summer sometimes even into the fall on certain occasions. They have three different vegetation zones. And part of the reason we are looking at these wetlands specifically is because for one, they're the most abundant wetland type that we have here in the region. But also those temporary and seasonal wetlands are known for being particularly a disturbance prone whether it's cultivation or climate change, any of those sort of factors, certain parts of the prairie pothole region we've actually lost up to 90% of our temporary and seasonal potholes. So now looking at land management, particularly just for these Fish and Wildlife Service fee title lands, so those fee title lands, I'm sure everybody's familiar with them, they're the National Wildlife Refuges and WPAs. All of our work for this study was actually done on just WPAs, I believe. But the way a lot of these lands look today reflects how they were when they were acquired to some extent. So some were acquired as native prairie back in the day, I think dating all the way back into the 1930s, but a lot of them were actually cultivated at some point in time and had to be reseeded or reconstructed back into the perennial grassland that you see there today. I'd like to point out just that these reseeding efforts, a lot of the time, they were just the uplands that were being reseeded, the wetlands themselves weren't actually being reseeded on these lands. And early management often focused on reseeding these lands, whether it's by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the previous landowner for like other, for whether it for grazing or dense nesting cover for waterfall, which often included introduced species and lots of times these lands were left idle for many years at a time, but obviously as we've heard today, a lot more of these efforts have improved and they now focus more on species diversity and ecological integrity. Another thing I'd like to point out just these lands, most of them aren't large parcels of native prairie, they're these small parcels of grassland on the landscape that might be checkerboarded with native prairie, some perennial reseeded grassland and agriculture, sometimes they're very small tracks that are completely surrounded by agriculture. And then just looking at the plant community composition differences for these native or reseeder wetlands. And again, I'm just gonna say reseeded wetlands because it's a lot easier than saying reseeded or wetlands that are on reseeded grassland every single time, but like I said, they weren't actually often reseeded themselves. So the wetlands and the native prairie, pretty much every study that's looked at comparing the two have found that wetlands and native prairie tend to have a lot higher species reached richness than their reseeded counterparts. And then those restored or reseeded wetlands tend to have a lot higher abundance of invasive species and therefore with higher abundance, you get a reduction in native diversity and native cover overall. So here's our study area. We had 200 different wetland sites that we visited. Specifically, I'd like to point out all those purple shaded areas, those are the US Fish and Wildlife Service fee title lands. You can see there's quite a bit of it on the landscape and every single one of these sites are done on these lands. So one of the points of this study was to do research like this on a region wide landscape. So you can see our sites range all the way down from southeastern South Dakota up into Northwestern North Dakota. So for the overall study design, we had 250 sites that were used. We had 200 primary sites and those were 100 seasonal and 100 temporary as classified by the National Wetlands Inventory. And then we had 25 of each that were oversample sites and those oversample sites were only to be used if those primary sites were deemed unsuitable for the study. Some examples of when they'd be deemed unsuitable as just lack of access such as if they were completely surrounded by private land and there was no way we could get onto that WPA or if a lot of times the National Wetland Inventory isn't perfect.  So we only wanted to use seasonal and temporary wetlands. And then we actually rather than 100 of each we ended up with 141 seasonal wetlands and 59 temporary. And that's because the field crews, so basically myself and Dr. Kaiser, we had the ultimate, the final say in determining what that wetland classification actually was and we based that on number of vegetation zones present. So if there were three vegetation zones present we classified it as a seasonal wetland. If there were two vegetation zones present we classified it as a temporary wetland. And then to look more in depth at our plant communities we use the index of plant community integrity which is a plant species-based IBI which was developed for the region specifically. It's a condition assessment method. And the reason we use that because for the other part of my research which I won't get into but if you wanna talk to me about it afterwards that's fine, we looked at the conditions of these wetlands but also it uses a quadrat method which collects species cover data which could be used for the analysis that we wanted to do. And then you collect cover data on those primary species at the site but you're also collecting or recording secondary species at the site and those secondary species are any species that are found within or not within between but not within the quadrats. And then just to test for significant differences between those receded and native prairie wetland plant communities we use multi-response permutation procedure and then to look for the drivers of plant community composition we use non-metric multidimensional scaling and we separated out plant communities for that by both wetland classification and vegetation zones. So an example would be wet meadow zone of temporary wetlands or shallow marsh of seasonal wetlands would be considered its own plant community that we were looking at for that. So here's that quadrat method that we were using. So for the low prairie area we had eight quadrats for the wet meadow area there were seven quadrats for the shallow marsh we use five quadrats. For those outer zones they were evenly placed around the wetland and tried to have them centered within that zone and then for the innermost zone so the shallow marsh for seasonal wetlands and wet meadow for temporary wetlands you started more near the outside of that zone and you worked your way in a spiraling fashion to get the best representation of the overall cover in that zone. All right, so getting off into the beginning of our results. So just looking at species frequency overall so this is species as they're appearing either as primary or secondary species we identified 348 species over the course of the study at the 200 different wetland sites. Most of those species were occurring infrequently. So these were the 25 species that were found at at least 50% of the wetland sites that we visited. As you can see quite a few of those species are introduced species. And I wanted to point out those top four species particularly because the four most commonly found species were all introduced species and that was our Canada thistle, Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brolman field south thistle all found at least 90% of the wetland sites that we visited. And then in fact, Canada thistle and Kentucky bluegrass we actually found in at least some capacity at every single wetland site that we visited most often in that low prairie area. So just looking at comparing those native and reseeded areas, seeing if our results aligned with previous research on basically they did four out of the five plant communities that we tested they were significantly different for the plant communities between the native and reseeded grasslands. The only one where it was not significantly different was the low prairie of temporary wetlands. Just to give you guys a very brief overview of what that plant community composition actually looked like. So this is that temporary low prairie the only one which was not significantly different and showing those dominant invasive species. So the two cool season invasive grasses of the average relative cover at sites for smooth brolman Kentucky bluegrass as well as other introduced species, native graminoids, native forbs and native trees and shrubs. You can see there all the way across the board things did not look that much different. The biggest difference there is the cover in smooth brome between the reseeded and the native wetlands but smooth brome still had say pretty high cover at the both the reseeded and the native prairie wetlands over 30% average relative cover for both. Whereas we look at the temporary wet meadow which was significantly different between the two you can see it's pretty obvious the differences there. This time the dominant species was reed canary grass a lot higher cover at those reseeded wetlands and then our native graminoids tended to have a lot higher cover at those native prairie wetlands. So now looking at our seasonal wetlands overall so seasonal low prairie was considered significantly different overall when you look at it this way it doesn't actually appear that difference the biggest difference that I'm seeing here anyways is those other introduced species like our Canada thistle or quack grass things like that. There is a twice as much in the reseeded wetlands as there are in the native wetlands but then when we look at our seasonal wet meadow again you're seeing that major difference between the reseeded and the native especially for that dominant invasive species and those native graminoids and then looking at our seasonal shallow marsh area we're seeing that same thing this time the dominant invasive species not a cool season invasive grass it's a hybrid cattail instead but you're seeing those same differences there. All right getting into our non-metric multi-dimensional scaling analysis. So for every plant community that we tested NMS produce three axes to help explain the variation that's going on within the plant community. I think the three axes combined for each plant community explained about 70 to 85% of the variation that was going on in the data set and then axis one always explained the most variation that was going on the data set ranged anywhere from about 26 to 43% axis two explain the second most axis three explain the least amount of variation in the data set and then in order for a species to be significantly correlated with that axis it had to have a correlation coefficient with an absolute value of 0.4 or greater the closer that absolute value is to one the more significant that correlation the closer it is to zero the less correlated it is with that axis and these are all the species that were correlated significantly correlated with at least one of the axes for temporary wetlands. I won't go through all the species I just want to point out two in particular and that is our smooth brome with the low axis one of the low prairie and reed canary grass with axis one of the wet meadow. Like I said axis one is explaining the most variation that's going on in the data set. We were looking at it when we were looking at it originally we were more so looking for patterns within these plant communities similarities and species that were aligned on these axes to help explain the variation was going on there and we didn't find that at least not for axis one or any of these data sets. Instead we found that axis one appeared to be controlled by the cover of these dominant invasive species and just to show you that correlation why it is so significantly correlated with axis one. So this is temporary wetlands in the low prairie with smooth brome that central graph there each one of those symbols represents a wetland site and that the size of the symbol reflects the relative abundance of that species at the wetland site. So you can see it's fairly obvious there along axis one on that left hand side those sites have a lot higher abundance on the right hand side. Those sites have a lot lower abundance. It's more obvious here when we're looking at reed canary grass those sites on the left hand side have a very high abundance and when you're looking at that right hand side there's very low abundance. So that's why we're seeing such a significant correlation there. So now looking at those seasonal wetlands. So again, we're seeing that exact same thing here. Axis one explains the most variation and axis one appears to be controlled almost completely by the abundance of those dominant invasive species. So they seem to really be driving whatever variation is going on with axis one for the plant community data sets. And again, just looking at those figures there, very obvious when you're looking at them this way, why there's such a significant correlation with those species. All right, so just getting into conclusions and our takeaways now. So looking at the species frequency and what species overall we had appearing on the landscape, those most commonly found species, unfortunately we're all introduced species, at least those four most commonly found the Canada thistle, Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome and South thistle. We did have some native species which were occurring very frequently, but they were all species which are known to be able to handle a little bit higher levels of disturbance. And our biggest takeaway from this, I believe just looking at the regional area and the regional diversity in general is a lot of the regional diversity is being found at a very small percentage of the wetlands that were actually being surveyed. So these good condition native prairie wetlands are harboring a disproportionate amount of the overall plant species biodiversity that we have on the landscape. So they're very important for the overall biodiversity that we have most of those poor condition wetlands that we are seeing out there. We're seeing the same species over and over again and it was in these good condition native prairie areas where we were seeing most of our diversity and seeing our infrequently occurring species. So similar to mostly or all the other studies that have looked at the comparison between the native and the reseeded areas, four out of our five plant communities that we tested were significantly different for that native and the reseeded wetlands. So with all the management and everything that's going on, obviously those upland areas are a lot more diverse with the updated management regimes that we have now but the wetlands in particular still are not seeming to closely resemble the native prairie areas. And our dominant invasive species appear to be playing a very significant role, maybe even a larger role than we expected in shaping the overall plant communities that we have in these wetlands. And so overall the plant community composition appears to be the most significant driver for that plant community composition appears to be the abundance of those dominant invasive species. So that'd be smooth brome for the low prairie, reed canary grass for the wet meadow and hybrid cat tail for the shallow marsh. A lot of other literature has proved that these species are in fact a problem. Obviously that's what we're here for. It's what we've been talking about this whole conference and a lot of studies have been shown that these species are highly correlated with reduction in native diversity and native species cover. But I guess we're kind of taking it one step further and saying that these species are ultimately responsible for a significant proportion of the change that's going on within these plant communities. One reason why we think that especially is because these species were showing the same level of influence regardless of the vegetation zone that they were in and regardless of their means of colonization for that site. So smooth brome a lot of times was actually planted in some of these areas or at least nearby in some of these areas. So it's obvious why to some people why there might be really high covers of smooth brome at some of these sites, but our reed canary grass or hybrid cat tail had to rely usually on more natural means of colonization to get into these areas. But we were seeing that same trend with all of these plant communities, regardless of this. There's always gonna be different factors affecting whether these species are there in the first place. Like I said, they might have been planted there. They might be near agricultural land where those species can easily come in and colonize those areas. But either way, they are driving a significant proportion of that plant community composition change. And one thing we are noticing is that once they're established, they're often reaching very high relative covers at these sites. Some of the sites they had near 100% relative cover and they were out competing all other species that were there native and introduced species alike. We were seeing some species such as Kentucky bluegrass where it appeared that it was being out competed by other the dominant invasive species such as smooth brome. So in order to get a better grasp on the plant communities and what's actually driving the change. So continued monitoring is gonna be very important for that. We have this base of information now. We have, we know the wetland sites that we visited be very important to go back and look at these sites after some point to see if these plant communities have changed more over time. And that might help us get a better understanding of why and if there are any other drivers that are present. And then especially after these lands are acquired and reseeded with all the diverse native seed mix that we have now will be good to continue. It sounds like we are monitoring them now especially to look at when and if these dominant invasive species are getting back into those areas and at what point or what's influencing them for taking over like we saw in many of these wetlands. And then one thing I really wanted to emphasize like I said, mostly the uplands were being reseeded in these areas. The wetlands were not actually being reseeded with native wetland species. So restoration of these lands should be including reseeding the wetlands as well with native species if we really want to see a lot of diversity in these reseeded prairie wetlands. And everybody has been saying this the whole conference but you can't always emphasize it enough that we need to prioritize this invasive species control. And I would say focusing on the reduction and prevention of spread into these native areas should be the highest priority because like I said those native prairie areas the good condition wetlands are really harboring a disproportionate amount of the overall species biodiversity that we have on the landscape. So if those areas get heavily invaded and we see the same trends that we were seeing in a lot of these other wetlands with a reduction in overall species diversity that will not be good on a landscape scale for biodiversity. That's all I have. Are there any questions?


And the chairman of the APC Ward Congress in Oshun State, Benga Elekbeleye, has debunked reports that they did not consult with stakeholders before the ward congress in the state. Elekbeleye said this during a press conference which held that the party secretary at Inoshukbo, according to him, those pending the news had a self-servant motive. I'm using this opportunity on behalf of my colleagues at the congress committee. All of us members of the congress have sent in the National Central APC here. I use that opportunity. These are copies of the results from all the senatorial districts. I wanted to show you the samples and by so doing I am on behalf of my colleagues to clear those soul screens as representatives of the new assembly members of which of the ward is so representative. He also says only members that filed a nomination of field rather than nomination forms and went through screening were allowed to participate in the Saturday's exercise. He also insisted that the exercise was carried out in line with the principles and guidelines of the party as enshrined in its constitution and in accordance with the directive of the national leadership of the APC. Only those who filed the nomination forms and passed through the screening process were allowed to contest for the election and those declared wanted and those who filed the forms and passed through the screening exercise and they are the ones that also declare winners of the world congress. That's why we were given a mandate from the national circuitry that's why we are going to declare those who did not collect nomination forms, we didn't see them. That's why we declare somebody who did not pass through the screening process. So it is those who participated in the congress who filed for nomination forms, went through screening exercises that is where we can say okay you are eligible or not.


Hey Psych2Goers, do you believe in the importance of privacy? Some people certainly do. And if you live a life without it, like many celebrities and public figures, it's easy to understand why it's so important to keep some things in your life to yourself. As British author C.S. Lewis once said, we live in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore we are starved for meditation and true friendship. Because no matter how much we may want to open up and share our true selves with others, the kind of connection we crave for can only be satisfied if we respect our own privacy and be careful about who we let in. So here are 7 things you're definitely better off keeping private. Number 1. Your Family Problems Sometimes you're better off keeping your family problems to yourself because the truth is everyone has them but no one really wants to hear about them. Anyway, the issues between you and your family stay between you and your family. Getting other people involved will only stir up more trouble than it's worth. So next time someone tries to stick their nose in your family's business, simply steer the conversation to another topic or tell them you prefer to keep it private. Number 2. Your Relationship Issues Just like how you should keep your family problems within your family, it's better to keep your relationship issues within your relationship as well. Complaining too much about your significant other is only going to paint them in a bad light and although your anger and frustration might pass, others might not be so forgiving. They might take you confiding your romantic troubles to them to mean that they have a say in your relationship which they don't. Of course, if you're having issues with your relationship and need to confide in your friends, that's completely understandable. Number 3. Your Income or Financial Situation It's something of an unspoken social rule that it's generally considered rude to talk about money because no matter how much you make or aren't making, talking about your financial situation to other people is bound to either make them feel jealous, uncomfortable or sorry for you. Complaining about being broke or comparing how much money you make with other people is never a good idea. After all, there's not much they can do about it so what's the point? Better to just keep that between you and your bank account. Number 4. Your Fears and Weaknesses Talking about our fears and weaknesses takes us to a very vulnerable place. And it's a side of us we shouldn't show to just anyone. Some people can be incredibly too faced and might just make fun of you behind your back while others might try to manipulate and exploit you when given the chance. Others still might not understand or empathize with you which is only going to make you feel worse. So before you tell anyone your worries or past mistakes, you need to be absolutely sure that they can be trusted. Number 5. Your Dreams and Goals It's probably for the best that you keep most of your dreams and goals in life to yourself. The more people you share them with, the less motivated you're likely to become. Why? Because people always have something to say and if you invite them into the conversation they might try to fill your mind with criticisms, doubts and discourage you. Especially if they can't understand why you want this or that. Don't worry too much about that though. It's not for them to understand. Your dreams are your own and you deserve to nurture them with the peace of mind only privacy can bring. Number 6. Your Personal Secrets While this is something a lot of us learn at a young age, we should always be careful about who we choose to divulge our personal secrets to. Do you really know this person? Are you sure they can be trusted to keep your secrets and not spread it for gossip or use it against you next time you get into a fight? If you're not careful about who you trust, it could lead to a lot of embarrassment, pain and heartbreak for you down the road. So make sure you trust who you share your secrets with. Number 7. Other People's Secrets Similar to the previous point, if someone trusts you enough to tell you something in confidence then it simply wouldn't be right to do anything to break their trust or jeopardize your relationship with them. It might not have been easy for them to share that with you and letting other people know about it without their consent could be very upsetting to them. Just imagine how humiliated and betrayed you might feel if someone did that to you. You wouldn't wish that for anyone else, now would you? So what do you think? Do you keep these things to yourself? What other things do you think are better to keep private? If you have any more tips or suggestions, leave them in the comments down below. And remember, these are not hard rules that you should always stick to. Every situation is different and it's important to talk about things that stress you out, as long as it's with someone trustworthy.


tutorial guys we're in iOS 13 I'm in my iPhone Pro Max whatever the hell it is the one of the three cameras on it I get there the Pro Max you know the fancy one I'm gonna show you how to edit videos inside your iPhone or your iPad for that matter using iOS 13 and the new updates that just came out guys this is wild there was updates to photos I did a video on that in the previous one but the video the updates to the video editing are what really separate the iOS 13 update so with less further ado let's roll first step click on photos at the top right here right beside camera boom the next step is we're gonna select a video I'm gonna select this one I just took just for this and I click on it and you're gonna see two puppies playing my favorite thing that's my dog Kingston on the bottom and my my brother's dog Kimmy on the top and Kingston get into half guard oh well whatever anyways guys joking aside let's get right into this to next step that you want to get this thing rolling with is to click the edit button top right as you'll see me hold it down and bang edit we're in business now you need to hold the phone up vertically because when you do it sideways it doesn't really work as well so I'll just do that just to show you this is how you edit now you'll notice here that it played it for me and okay let's just okay so the playhead is this white little head right here and it's at the beginning so if I hit play you'll see that it goes through a bunch of nonsense and off we go I'm gonna move it back to the start okay good now here's the thing the video editing now has pretty much the same functionality and features as photo editing and this is wild now it's default set to this camera icon but when you click the one to the right of it which I'll hold down as you see I'm holding down I'll let go it has a host of features and they applied to the video so you'll see here auto exposure highlights shadows contrast brightness black point yeah I can read tint sharpness etc etc etc vignette all of these features are completely available to videos so let's go ahead and just click on a few things the first one I will show you is auto auto as you can see here made a few changes I'll click it again click it again and in a lot of cases they get it right like let's I'll just be blunt I mean Apple's got some really smart people working and when you click auto they make some really nice changes to the video but let's assume that you want to do your own custom changes so as you can see here as I slide to the right exposure I'm gonna go ahead click on exposure like I just did and then here's the trick it's basically just a little slider at the bottom and it goes horizontally and you can increase or decrease exposure as you see fit now I'm gonna increase it a little bit because I like the brighter look and let's go with an exposure of 14 then I will go to the next one highlights do I want to adjust the highlights down do I want to adjust them up again everybody has their own taste in video and their own taste in photography but the main takeaway here is that the features that you have for photos are now available for videos and it is awesome I'm gonna go ahead and click shadows and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna increase the shadows to 23 contrast I like contrast in my videos so I'm gonna increase it and I'm gonna increase it quite a bit just to show you the effect brightness is it too bright to not too bright let's see here let's go really bright it's go really really dark generally you like to go a little brighter so I'm gonna go with like an 8 and again black point this is kind of not something I use too much but it is good if you're doing like color correction and you're that good saturation I like saturated photos and videos so I'm gonna saturate it a bit more okay we're gonna color your world and again guys vibrance I like vibrance yeah that makes it look a little bit more on me I like that a bit too much and again you know what guys as you can see here let's go a little bluer here and whatever I mean whatever works for you right but the bottom line is this is how you do it I'm gonna hit cancel because I'm gonna show you one more awesome thing as well so I hit cancel discard changes now we're gonna go back in so I'm gonna hold down edit at the top right there as you can see I did the other option is I'm gonna decline that phone call from my stepmother because I'm filming how could she know that she couldn't I'm going to hit the third one in and this is also cool filters I might have to make an entire video on this just the health just the hell of it but here's the bottom line guys you can make video filters on the whole video do you like this filter let's say dramatic warm I like it click done now watch saving the video I mean how cool is this this is mental right like they're doing this to entire like this is a 23 second video and it's gonna apply that filter to every single frame in there most videos you know I mean I guess the iPhone for saves that 60 frames per second 4k so every single second is 60 frames captain obvious is checking in again but you know for a 23 second video that's like 1800 that's almost 2000 frames every single one of those frames has this applied to it so when I click back you'll see here in the video when I click on it again the filter has been applied to the whole video guys this is amazing stuff from Apple I hope you enjoyed this tutorial I've got a ton of stuff coming up thanks for watching


Hey everybody, it's Brian and I have not recorded a video in a very long time. I'm hoping that will change It is Wow, what is it January 2nd 2014? That's right all these nice beautiful pictures I couldn't really pick one, but happy new year everybody so What have I been doing? Where have I been? Well, I switched jobs. I Worked at a casino, which if you've ever worked at a casino knows just it devours your soul I spent almost every waking minute doing nothing but work to save my Sanity and my relationship. I changed jobs. I now work for a company called CNSI But with switching jobs comes the new job headache where you work a lot of hours, etc, etc So it's been kind of a rough year So I've been kind of reflecting on my channel and what I want to do and As far as coding goes what I've really been working on is this plug-in service It was my first Kickstarter project the project did not get funding, but you know what it's not really about the money for me So I'm just gonna go ahead and do it anyways I've really spent over a year on this project in 2013 I really just put my nose to the grindstone and I've actually got the website done it looks much better than that and I've got the let me see if I can bring it up here. Yeah, I've got the actual testbed application here and It will talk about more of this in the coming year But I wanted to get back into doing tutorials because well, I kind of miss doing it So this year I want to really focus in on the yee framework for PHP Yee is an acronym stands for yes, it is and I think I've actually made a video where I've said You know, I'm going to do more tutorials, but I really mean it this time now that my life isn't so crazy Also want to get back into doing cute because well, I love cute Cute's undergone quite a bit of change lately They just released version what is it 5.2 and Also during the year it got sold to a company called digia. Nokia actually sold it which I Don't know. I didn't like the direction. Nokia was taking it So I think it was actually a good thing But there's a split where there is the commercial version available by digia and the open source version Available by the cute project work Nine times out of ten. We're going to visit cute project because well open source is just awesome Of course, I say that and you see Windows browser in case you're wondering why I'm on Windows Well, that's why I'm currently patching and if you're on steam and you're a gamer my acronyms root shell Do they call it an acronym anymore? My handle is root shell So you can always find me out there Some things that have gone on in the cute world cute 5.2 introduced some very interesting features They now have official support for iOS so you can actually compile and put your applications on an iPhone and an iPad I believe I haven't tested that yet. He also full support for Android and a whole bunch of other goodies And this year I really want to dig into cute because there's a whole lot of stuff that well, we just haven't learned so Not going to write any code. I was just saying hi and happy New Year's and just letting you guys know where I've been but um Also, I kind of want to start getting into more structured programs like you see these PRI files This is probably a mystery to some of you out there. What do these things do? Well, you can actually well, maybe we will write a little code here You can actually take your project file and then include These PRI files and these PRIs are just project implementation files So you see how where I have a baster That's where the code for this is at a build directory, which is where I'm building the actual code and An include dirt and that's where the actual code is being included. So my actual program is just this Headers and source, but I'm including these PRI files, which are just directories See like here's the message Project and that's the PRI file for it Which just has the include path which just includes the include dirt and blah blah blah I got a little crazy about this, but I wanted to make it so I could easily add Different project implementation files in here. So it's all about encapsulation You know, I want the message section to be different than the plug-in manager section So see how each one has its own headers and sources things like that I mean, we should really talk about these because I get pinged with a lot of questions of you know How do I use headers? How do I include files? How do I do this? How do I do that? And well, there's one of me and about 400 million of you. So there you go. Anyways Happy New Year's Been a long time since I've done a video. I look forward to doing a lot more So if you have any ideas, let me know it's gonna be slow going at first. Like I said, I'm still in the new job mode But I really like this new job. It got some really good and talented people that work there Anyways, this is Brian. Happy New Year's and I'll see you soon