River Restoration in Victoria, Australia: Change is in the Wind, and None too Soon

Stream restoration has become a multibillion dollar industry worldwide, yet there are few clear success stories and the scientific basis for effective stream restoration remains uncertain. We compiled data on completed river restoration projects from four management authorities in Victoria, Australia, to examine how the available data could inform the science of restoration ecology in rivers, and thus improve future restoration efforts. We found that existing data sources are limited and much historical information has been lost through industry restructuring and poor data archiving. Examining records for 2,247 restoration projects, we found that riparian management projects were the most common, followed by bank stabilization and in‐stream habitat improvement. Only 14% of the project records indicated that some form of monitoring was carried out. It is evident that overall there is little scientific guidance and little or no monitoring and evaluation of the projects for which we had information. However, recent advances with mandatory, statewide reporting and an increased emphasis on project design and monitoring strongly suggest that the design, implementation, monitoring, and reporting of stream restoration projects have improved in recent years and will continue to do so.     

Functional interactions of human and murine lymphoid cells. I. Analysis of primary and secondary responses

In this study human T-cell responses against murine alloantigens were analyzed. The results show that optimal primary responses are obtained from peripheral blood mononuclear cells only when murine splenic adherent cells (SAC) were used as antigen. Further analysis revealed that human T cells were able to respond directly to murine cells without the need for antigen reprocessing; however, human interleukin 1 (IL-1) was required for optimal stimulation. In contrast, secondary proliferative responses to murine cellular antigens could be induced from primed T cells even in the absence of SAC and/or IL-1. These proliferative responses, and in addition, cytotoxic T-cell responses, were specific for the priming antigen. Long-term human T-cell lines specific for murine alloantigens were found to replace the need for murine T cells in antigen-specific murine B-cell responses to sheep red blood cells. The mechanism of help delivered by the human T cells appeared to be by the release of nonspecific helper-T-cell factors. The evidence presented for this is the inability of these cells to stimulate cells from mice that express the X chromosome B-cell defect xid.