From installing culverts with larger safety margins to instituting more frequent training for weather emergencies, transportation agencies around the world are adapting to extreme weather and climate change. An understanding of when and how to adapt (i.e., improve infrastructure preparedness) requires evaluating existing and future vulnerabilities to climate change and prioritizing adaptation efforts. A successful vulnerability assessment lays the groundwork for adaptation by building stakeholder relationships, spurring data collection, and prioritizing needs. One barrier faced by transportation agencies in conducting vulnerability assessments is a lack of financial and staff resources. The process of collecting climate and asset data can be particularly onerous for agencies struggling to meet daily operational needs. Two recent projects piloted a cost-effective screening method for highly vulnerable assets that used indicators developed from data already being collected by many state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations. The indicator that libraries developed during the course of these two studies is described. The results of the data-driven vulnerability screen provide transportation managers with a low-cost starting point toward understanding their system's vulnerabilities. Future research should focus on testing the indicators to identify and eliminate areas of overlap and on evaluating the prediction accuracy for exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

The serious assessment of climate change impacts on transportation is just six years old. Yet considerable progress has been made in this short time. Analytical frameworks to couple decision support for transportation decision makers at the national, regional, and local levels with the leading edge of climate science have been established and tested. A better understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities facing transportation agencies has been accomplished through a growing number of assessments. But significant gaps exist, and the full integration of climate impacts in transportation planning, design, and operations has yet to be accomplished. Adaptation planning and implementation lag except where disasters have struck. Research must play a critical role over the next decade to address societal impacts, better define critical concepts and make them useful for practitioners, and integrate climate concerns more completely in the natural and built environments across all sectors, including transportation.

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Objectives Differences in messaging from healthcare and wellness practitioners can lead to consumer confusion and mistrust in nutrition. The regular use of evidence-based nutrition resources by practitioners could improve consistency in patient education. The confidence registered dietitians (RDNs) and non-RDN practitioners have in providing nutrition education and the use of evidence-based nutrition resources in patient education is not known. Objectives: 1) To evaluate how confident RDN and non-RDN practitioners are in providing nutrition education, and 2) to evaluate RDN and non-RDN use of evidence-based nutrition resources. Methods An exploratory, online, cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sample of 34 RDNs and 32 non-RDN practitioners. The 15 question survey was tested for face validity and revised accordingly. Recruitment occurred via email and through local and state-wide professional organization list-serves. Confidence questions were measured using Likert scales and were scored from 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (extremely confident). Differences in confidence between groups were determined using Mann-Whitney U tests (P < 0.05). Results Eighty-five % of RDNs and 31% of non-RDNs felt very or extremely confident in their ability to find evidence-based nutrition information; 65% of RDNs and 31% of non-RDNs felt very or extremely confident in their ability to provide evidence-based nutrition information to their patients. Non-RDNs felt less confident than RDNs both in finding (P < 0.01) and providing (P < 0.01) evidence-based nutrition information. Forty-one % of non-RDNs reported providing nutrition education to more than a quarter of their patients over the past year. More than 60% of RDNs and more than 70% of non-RDNs reported being unfamiliar with or never using multiple resources for evidence-based nutrition information, including Cochrane, Nutrition Evidence Systematic Reviews, and Practice-based Evidence in Nutrition. Conclusions The majority of RDNs and a third of non-RDNs felt highly confident in their ability to find and provide evidence-based nutrition information. However, more than half of RDNs and non-RDNs reported being unfamiliar with or never using multiple resources for evidence-based nutrition information. Funding Sources College at Oneonta Foundation and the SUNY Oneonta Alumni Association.

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