VRN: Wildlife values, Library spending tops police spending, Less commuting is healthier, Vermont slips in youth mental health

Library spending tops police spending

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Cicero

Monday April 4 marks the start of national library week. Vermont has more libraries per capita than any state in the U.S. with about 180 operating libraries. A new analysis from UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont finds 29 Vermont towns spend more on their libraries than they do on police services. But police spending tops library spending by more than $100,000 on average of the 54 towns surveyed. Read the press release here.

Less commuting means healthier Vermonters
During the pandemic Vermonters drove less and many continue to work from home and demand increased telecommuting options. A state by state survey based on county health data found that more than 80,000 Vermonters had improved health outcomes from reduced car commutes to work. See also the Burlington Free Press here.

Vermont slipped from first to fourth over the last year in a national ranking of youth mental health, according to a new report. The report from the national Hopeful Futures Campaign shows some setbacks in the past year for Vermont. The number of youth who experienced at least one major depressive episode in the last year increased by about 2%, and the number of youth with major depressive episodes in the past year who did not receive treatment increased by the same percentage. The report also evaluates state policies for improving and checking on student mental health.

In a new analysis political scientist Marco Rosaire Rossi examines the municipal issues facing Burlington, VT in the 1980s and how they impacted the development of two prominent figures on the American left: Murray Bookchin and Bernie Sanders. Rossi gives a detailed history of these two men as they developed politically, as well as the conflicts between their respective positions, with a focus on their disagreements about the role of economic growth, sustainability, waterfront development, and small-scale neighborhood assemblies in the creation of socialism.

The woodwasp sirex noctilio fabricius, an invasive species of wasp from Spain, has a far higher potential for population growth in the northeastern USA than in its native range, according to a new analysis. Scholars collected infested logs from New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont and sealed them in barrels to track the fertility and body size of the wasps which emerged. The USDA Forest Service estimates that Sirex, whose eggs are coated with a fungus that is toxic to the trees where they reproduce, could cost between $2.8 and $17 billion in lost sawtimber and pulpwood values if it becomes a nationwide established species.

Originally discovered at Parker’s Cobble in 1884, a bivalved arthropod from the Cambrian explosion has recently provided new insight into the taxa of insects which lived during the time. This arthropod, whose new classification is vermontcaris montcalmi, belonged to a now-extinct order of crustaceans who appear in the fossil record before the earliest trilobites. What allowed the Cambridge-university scholars to identify vermontcaris was its soft-tissue preservation type in the Burgess Shale of the quarry; the rock also contained the remains of several other arthropods from the era.

A new kind of calicivirus has been found on the skins of Brown Bullhead fish in Lake Memphremagog in northern Vermont. Calicivirus is a classification of viruses including Norwalk virus, which is responsible for gastroenteritis in humans and several other maladies in other organisms; in the past it has been difficult to study because only some types can be grown in a culture. By sequencing the genome of the new virus, the scholars discovered that it is most closely related to a calicivirus found in North Atlantic Salmon. The appearance of the virus is notable since Brown Bullhead fish are used to assess the overall health of the ecosystems where they live.

A study conducted by researchers at the Vermont Center on Behavior and Health at the University of Vermont found that for some, knowledge of COVID-19 is associated with a reduction in cigarette and e-cigarette use, as well as an increase in motivation to quit. Nearly a quarter of respondents reduced their cigarette and e-cigarette use to reduce risk of harm from COVID-19, the researchers found.

Meet our research news editors, Thaina Calix and Oscar Mcintosh, in videos produced by Dominic Williams and Ian Anglum.

Visiting Artist Talk - Yevgeniya Baras - April 7
Sculpting Heads in Clay - April 7
Amos Lee at Higher Ground - April 11
Vergennes City-Wide Arts Festival - April 15