Lake Region State College (LRSC) is a public junior college in Devils Lake, North Dakota. It was founded in 1941 as an extension of the public school system and first known as Devils Lake Junior College and Business School. Several name changes have occurred over the years ranging from Lake Region Junior College to Community College. The current name of Lake Region State College was adopted in 1999. From 1987 until 1999, the college was a branch campus of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, known as UND-Lake Region. In 1984, the college became a part of the North Dakota University System.
Objective: Community colleges have historically reported high levels of student mental health needs, with low levels of available face to face services. Ways of meeting this mental health staffing challenge is an area of import for each institution. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this situation. The objective of this analysis is to examine the impact of the pandemic on college students, with particular attention to community college student mental health issues and to illuminate a possible strategy to respond the expanded staffing needs faced by this sector of higher education. Method: This work is based on a review of studies reporting the pandemic's impact on community college student mental health, and needed mental health staffing. Two case studies, one urban and one rural, are presented here to highlight needed community college-university partnerships focused on increasing mental health professionals for community colleges. Results: The case studies illuminated commonalities between urban-rural settings, as well as challenges. Based on the literature review and case studies a generic model for responding to this critical mental health staffing need is presented. Contributions: This work challenges the notion that traditional staffing arrangements are the only patterns available to expand needed mental health professionals needed in community colleges. Studies of alternative staffing arrangement, evaluation, impact, and student satisfaction are warranted.
One hundred years ago, Paul Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy independently proposed that living organisms interact with their environment through systems. In the century that has followed, systems thinking and modeling have grown in tandem with discovery of the vast complexity of the universe at microscopic through astronomic levels. As our knowledge base increases, methods of organization for efficient mental models and insight into key variables for leverage points become crucial. This is particularly important in learning design environments. As educators increasingly grapple with fostering learning in ill-structured problem spaces, systems thinking and modeling provide means of aiding our cognitive processing capacity, enabling us to understand how to solve the problem systemically. The explosion of computing power throughout the century supports systems thinking for learning design through progressively robust modeling tools. Today, emergence of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities is poised to provide an expanded toolset for insights into network interconnections and leverage points. This allows for improved learning design encompassing complex world issues, such as climate change, food insecurity, health care and education.
In agricultural settings, microbes and antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) have the potential to be transferred across diverse environments and ecosystems. The consequences of these microbial transfers are unclear and understudied. On dairy farms, the storage of cow manure in manure pits and subsequent application to field soil as a fertilizer may facilitate the spread of the mammalian gut microbiome and its associated ARGs to the environment. To determine the extent of both taxonomic and resistance similarity during these transitions, we collected fresh manure, manure from pits, and field soil across 15 different dairy farms for three consecutive seasons. We used a combination of shotgun metagenomic sequencing and functional metagenomics to quantitatively interrogate taxonomic and ARG compositional variation on farms. We found that as the microbiome transitions from fresh dairy cow manure to manure pits, microbial taxonomic compositions and resistance profiles experience distinct restructuring, including decreases in alpha diversity and shifts in specific ARG abundances that potentially correspond to fresh manure going from a gut-structured community to an environment-structured community. Further, we did not find evidence of shared microbial community or a transfer of ARGs between manure and field soil microbiomes. Our results suggest that fresh manure experiences a compositional change in manure pits during storage and that the storage of manure in manure pits does not result in a depletion of ARGs. We did not find evidence of taxonomic or ARG restructuring of soil microbiota with the application of manure to field soils, as soil communities remained resilient to manure-induced perturbation.IMPORTANCE The addition of dairy cow manure-stored in manure pits-to field soil has the potential to introduce not only organic nutrients but also mammalian microbial communities and antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) to soil communities. Using shotgun sequencing paired with functional metagenomics, we showed that microbial community composition changed between fresh manure and manure pit samples with a decrease in gut-associated pathobionts, while ARG abundance and diversity remained high. However, field soil communities were distinct from those in manure in both microbial taxonomic and ARG composition. These results broaden our understanding of the transfer of microbial communities in agricultural settings and suggest that field soil microbial communities are resilient against the deposition of ARGs or microbial communities from manure.
Biofuel production has significantly increased in the past couple of decades with the aim of protecting the environment and ensuring energy independence. Water is consumed at all stages of biofuel production: at the agricultural level water is demanded for irrigation; at the industrial level it is used in the cooling and drying processes; and water is present in the biofuel that reaches the consumer. Increased demand for biofuels may have positive and negative impacts on water use and the environment. This chapter provides a summary analysis of the various impacts of biofuel production on water usage and scarcity in the United States along the biofuel supply chain. Consideration is given to practices and policies that promote water conservation along the supply chain. The goal of the chapter is to make readers aware of how biofuels' expansion could be promoted while being conscious of its impacts on water.
