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  Building In Her Own Right: White Paper for National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (Grant #PW-264121-19)

  Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries; Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College; Drexel University; In Her Own Right (2022-03-01)

  The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) Implementation grant to digitize thirty linear feet of materials from thirty-one collections in twelve of its member institutions and two additional repositories documenting the history of women’s civil rights and expose that and additional content on the web. The two-year grant, beginning in May 2019, was designed to ensure that a significant portion of the material would be online in the months surrounding the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth amendment: August 18, 2020. Additionally, collection-level records for any material not digitized by that time served as signposts for researchers seeking more timely access. That project built on the successes of a one-year NEH Foundations grant (July 2016-June 2017), designed to identify and disseminate information about collections in Philadelphia-area archives documenting women working for their own and other’s rights, 1820-1920. The content, provided on a pilot website (http://inherownright.org/), served as a resource for students and teachers as the nation began to look to the 100th anniversary of woman suffrage in 2020. PACSCL requested additional NEH funding to digitize more content from its member institutions and other institutions as well as to support outreach to find, digitize, and describe additional collections, particularly those documenting underrepresented populations. In Her Own Right also expanded its user audiences from high school students and undergraduates to include graduate students and scholars, by enhancing the website to include additional tools and resources supporting research use. This enabled the team to realize more fully an original core concept of the project: to provide both “retail” access (mediated content with contextualizing supporting materials) and “wholesale” access (unmediated raw material—both digitized content and metadata–for a range of future research and digital scholarship projects). The core of project work was digitizing and describing manuscript and some printed materials, held in area institutions, irrespective of the geographic focus of the collection itself. The digitized material is served up through a robust web presence that provides access to well-described digital items; the capacity to download and manipulate the descriptive data to generate new scholarly products; and other resources that will serve students and scholars studying not only women’s work leading up to the 1920 vote for woman suffrage, but countless other topics as well. The long narrative of women making incremental progress toward equality and opportunity continues to be relevant. To extend project work to document the conversations across race and class that the team began to reflect on during the Foundations grant, the Implementation proposal also budgeted time and staff to find, digitize, and describe additional collections documenting underrepresented populations. Initial research identified a number of potentially rich collections for inclusion that illuminated a broad range of activism among many groups of women. These included some groups that are underrepresented in the traditional historical narrative of women’s campaign for voting and other civil rights, but the project team also hoped to find even more collections relating to these underrepresented populations and recognized that doing so would require significant outreach beyond PACSCL members. Using PACSCL’s tested methodology from two Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections grants1 and PACSCL institution staff members trained in its process, the project team worked with small repositories in the area that lacked access tools or staff to identify “hidden voices.” This white paper, while highlighting the NEH Implementation phase of the project, also looks across 2016 to 2021, and outlines successes, challenges, learnings, and opportunities for continued project growth.
• PFAS in the Schuylkill River

  Andaluri, Gangadhar; Akbari, Elham (2024)

  The project aimed to conduct both targeted analyses of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the Schuylkill River. 16 sampling sites were employed to collect data on the occurrence of PFAS along a 50 mile stretch of the river in February, May, and July of 2024. The analysis focused on 40 specific PFAS compounds. All procedures were performed following the US EPA Method 1633, which utilized solid-phase extraction and LC/MC analysis. The data collected in this report indicate the presence of a variety of PFAS compounds at quantifiable levels, with PFBA, 6:2 FTS, PFOA, and PFOS being the most abundant, as found in nearly 100% of the sampling locations. Factors such as population density, proximity to industrial sites, and other pollution sources influence the distribution pattern of these compounds. The factors mentioned above are likely the reason for the increase in the concentrations of targeted PFAS and the number of compounds detected as we move from Pottstown toward the center of Philadelphia. Based on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for PFOA and PFOS health advisory levels, more than 60% of the samples exhibited a medium-risk profile. However, under the 2024 maximum contamination levels proposed by the EPA, an average of 70% of the samples across all locations showed a high-risk profile, with the remaining samples falling into the medium-risk category. While the ability to fully interpret the risks associated with PFAS in river water is limited, a rough estimation of the risk can be made using current drinking water regulations. This assessment is particularly crucial, as the Schuylkill River is a source of drinking water and is utilized by several wastewater and water treatment plants.
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  A Review of Antisynthetase Syndrome-Associated Interstitial Lung Disease

  Temple University. Hospital (2024-04-18)

  Our objective in this review article is to present a clinical case of a patient with antisynthetase syndrome (ASyS) and provide an overview of the pathogenesis, classification criteria, antibody profiles, clinical features, and current knowledge of treatment options, focusing on interstitial lung disease (ILD). ASyS is an uncommon autoimmune disease with a heterogenous clinical presentation characterized by the presence of autoantibodies against an aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase and manifested by myositis, fever, inflammatory arthritis, Raynaud’s phenomenon, mechanics hands, and ILD. ASyS-associated ILD (ASyS-ILD) is the most serious complication of ASyS, which may evolve to rapidly progressive ILD; therefore, it often requires thorough clinical and radiologic evaluation including recognition of a specific clinical phenotype associated with the antisynthetase antibodies (ASAbs) to guide therapeutic interventions.
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  Dispersal restriction and facilitation in species with differing tolerance to development: A landscape genetics study of native and introduced lizards

  Integrative Ecology Lab (Temple University); Center for Biodiversity (Temple University) (2024-05-16)

  Aim: The development of natural habitats into urban land uses has greatly accelerated in the recent past due to human activities. This habitat development disrupts species' natural dispersal processes and can lead to both direct and indirect impacts on dispersal. Whether human activities result in restricted or facilitated dispersal may depend on a species' development tolerance; however, this premise has not been tested. We examined the impact of urbanization and road networks on the dispersal of three lizard species in the context of their development tolerance. Location: Curaçao. Methods: To quantify species' development tolerance, we modelled three lizard species abundances at sites based on surrounding landscape development. Using microsatellite genotypes, we conducted individual-based resistance surface analyses and modelled the effect of habitat development on genetic admixture to assess indirect dispersal restriction and facilitation. We explored direct facilitation of dispersal using network analysis of mitochondrial haplotypes. Results: Phyllodactylus martini, a native gecko species, was the least tolerant of development and experienced indirect dispersal restriction due to roads, according to resistance surface analyses. Anolis lineatus, a native anole species, exhibited a neutral relationship with development. Resistance surfaces and Structure analyses showed that A. lineatus faced indirect dispersal restrictions from roads and developed areas, while mitochondrial haplotype networks suggested they benefited from occasional human-facilitated long-distance dispersal events. Hemidactylus mabouia, an introduced gecko species, was the most tolerant of development, and experienced no dispersal restriction, but mitochondrial haplotypes suggest direct long-distance dispersal facilitation. Main Conclusions: Our findings highlight development tolerance as a key predictor of dispersal impact for these species and future work should test whether these patterns are upheld in other systems. Understanding how human activities affect species' dispersal will aid in managing introduced species while promoting connectivity for native species navigating dispersal challenges in dynamic landscapes.
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  When species don’t move together: Non-concurrent range shifts in Eastern Pacific kelp forest communities

  Cortese, Mary R.; Freestone, Amy L. (2024-05-24)

  Species range shifts due to changing ocean conditions are occurring around the world. As species move, they build new interaction networks as they shift from or into new ecological communities. Typically, species ranges are modeled individually, but biotic interactions have been shown to be important to creating more realistic modeling outputs for species. To understand the importance of consumer interactions in Eastern Pacific kelp forest species distributions, we used a Maxent framework to model a key foundation species, giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), and a dominant herbivore, purple sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus). With neither species having previously been modeled in the Eastern Pacific, we found evidence for M. pyrifera expansion in the northern section of its range, with no projected contraction at the southern range edge. Despite its known co-occurrence with M. pyrifera, models of S. purpuratus showed a non-concurrent southern range contraction and a co-occurring northern range expansion. While the co-occurring shifts may lead to increased spatial competition for suitable substrate, this non-concurrent contraction could result in community wide impacts such as herbivore release, tropicalization, or ecosystem restructuring.

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