River valley segments are adjacent sections of streams and rivers that are relatively homogeneous in hydrology, limnology, channel morphology, riparian dynamics, and biological communities. River valley segments have been advocated as appropriate spatial units for assessing, monitoring, and managing rivers and streams for several reasons; however, methods for delineating these spatial units hav...

The Songhua River is the largest river in northeastern China; the river’s water quality is one of the most important factors that influence regional ecological health and food safety in northeastern China and even the downstream of the Heilong River in Russia. In recent years, the Chinese government implemented several water resource protection policies to improve the river’s water quality. In ...

The Yangtze River dolphin or baiji (Lipotes vexillifer), an obligate freshwater odontocete known only from the middle-lower Yangtze River system and neighbouring Qiantang River in eastern China, has long been recognized as one of the world's rarest and most threatened mammal species. The status of the baiji has not been investigated since the late 1990s, when the surviving population was estima...

Ross River virus (RRV) disease is the most frequently notified arboviral disease in Australia, and the burden of this disease to Australian society is significant. We have studied the incidence of RRV disease between 1992 and 2003 in South Australia. Our findings suggest that the incidence of the disease in South Australia over the study period was relatively stable. There were four epidemics i...

Disease control programs aim to constrain and reduce the spread of infection. Human disease interventions such as wildlife vaccination play a major role in determining the limits of a pathogen's spatial distribution. Over the past few decades, a raccoon-specific variant of rabies virus (RRV) has invaded large areas of eastern North America. Although expansion into Canada has been largely preven...

We report two cases of Ross River virus (RRV) infection in Dutch travellers who visited Australia during February to April 2015. These cases coincided with the largest recorded outbreak of RRV disease in Australia since 1996. This report serves to create awareness among physicians to consider travel-related RRV disease in differential diagnosis of patients with fever, arthralgia and/or rash ret...

This study examined the distribution of major mosquito species and their roles in the transmission of Ross River virus (RRV) infection for coastline and inland areas in Brisbane, Australia (27 degrees 28' S, 153 degrees 2' E). We obtained data on the monthly counts of RRV cases in Brisbane between November 1998 and December 2001 by statistical local areas from the Queensland Department of Healt...

Predicting the geographic spread of wildlife epidemics requires knowledge about the movement patterns of disease hosts or vectors. The field of landscape genetics provides valuable approaches to study dispersal indirectly, which in turn may be used to understand patterns of disease spread. Here, we applied landscape genetic analyses and spatially explicit models to identify the potential path o...

While most mosquito-borne viruses are associated with a narrow range of vector and reservoir host species, some pathogens have much larger vector and host assemblages. One such group is the Alphaviruses (including chikungunya virus [CHIKV]), with Ross River virus (RRV), endemic to Australia, providing a fascinating example of the complicated relationship between vector and reservoir host specie...

The viral immediate-early transactivator Rta/Orf50 is necessary and sufficient to initiate Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus/human herpesvirus 8 (KSHV/HHV-8) reactivation from latently infected cells. Since Rta/Orf50 is conserved among all known gamma-2-herpesviruses, we investigated whether the murine gamma-68-herpesvirus (MHV-68) and rhesus monkey rhadinovirus (RRV) homologs can functio...