Extensive Green Roofs in Mississippi: An Evaluation of Stormwater Retention under Local Climatic Conditions

Green roofs are increasingly being used in the United States to mitigate the negative effects of impervious surfaces on aquatic ecosystems. Though performance of these systems varies with climate, little research has been conducted in the Southeastern U.S., and no prior research has been conducted in Mississippi. An experiment was conducted to determine the effect of soil depth and roof slope on the stormwater retention of green roofs in Mississippi’s hot, humid climate. Simulated roof platforms were constructed to investigate two soil depths and two slopes, each replicated three times and planted with four species of Sedum. The green roof platforms significantly reduced runoff depth when compared with total rainfall depth. Soil depth and slope both significantly affected retention, with higher retention seen with increasing soil depth and lower retention seen with increasing slope. These results indicate that green roofs can be an effective tool to reduce runoff in Mississippi

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

Diversity, Loss, and Gain of Malaria Parasites in a Globally Invasive Bird

Invasive species can displace natives, and thus identifying the traits that make aliens successful is crucial for predicting and preventing biodiversity loss. Pathogens may play an important role in the invasive process, facilitating colonization of their hosts in new continents and islands. According to the Novel Weapon Hypothesis, colonizers may out-compete local native species by bringing with them novel pathogens to which native species are not adapted. In contrast, the Enemy Release Hypothesis suggests that flourishing colonizers are successful because they have left their pathogens behind. To assess the role of avian malaria and related haemosporidian parasites in the global spread of a common invasive bird, we examined the prevalence and genetic diversity of haemosporidian parasites (order Haemosporida, genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) infecting house sparrows (Passer domesticus). We sampled house sparrows (N = 1820) from 58 locations on 6 continents. All the samples were tested using PCR-based methods; blood films from the PCR-positive birds were examined microscopically to identify parasite species. The results show that haemosporidian parasites in the house sparrows' native range are replaced by species from local host-generalist parasite fauna in the alien environments of North and South America. Furthermore, sparrows in colonized regions displayed a lower diversity and prevalence of parasite infections. Because the house sparrow lost its native parasites when colonizing the American continents, the release from these natural enemies may have facilitated its invasion in the last two centuries. Our findings therefore reject the Novel Weapon Hypothesis and are concordant with the Enemy Release Hypothesis

The Eleventh and Twelfth Data Releases of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Final Data from SDSS-III

The third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) took data from 2008 to 2014 using the original SDSS wide-field imager, the original and an upgraded multi-object fiber-fed optical spectrograph, a new near-infrared high-resolution spectrograph, and a novel optical interferometer. All of the data from SDSS-III are now made public. In particular, this paper describes Data Release 11 (DR11) including all data acquired through 2013 July, and Data Release 12 (DR12) adding data acquired through 2014 July (including all data included in previous data releases), marking the end of SDSS-III observing. Relative to our previous public release (DR10), DR12 adds one million new spectra of galaxies and quasars from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) over an additional 3000 deg2 of sky, more than triples the number of H-band spectra of stars as part of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), and includes repeated accurate radial velocity measurements of 5500 stars from the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS). The APOGEE outputs now include the measured abundances of 15 different elements for each star. In total, SDSS-III added 5200 deg2 of ugriz imaging; 155,520 spectra of 138,099 stars as part of the Sloan Exploration of Galactic Understanding and Evolution 2 (SEGUE-2) survey; 2,497,484 BOSS spectra of 1,372,737 galaxies, 294,512 quasars, and 247,216 stars over 9376 deg2; 618,080 APOGEE spectra of 156,593 stars; and 197,040 MARVELS spectra of 5513 stars. Since its first light in 1998, SDSS has imaged over 1/3 of the Celestial sphere in five bands and obtained over five million astronomical spectra. \ua9 2015. The American Astronomical Society

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Tundra Trait Team : A database of plant traits spanning the tundra biome

Motivation The Tundra Trait Team (TTT) database includes field-based measurements of key traits related to plant form and function at multiple sites across the tundra biome. This dataset can be used to address theoretical questions about plant strategy and trade-offs, trait-environment relationships and environmental filtering, and trait variation across spatial scales, to validate satellite data, and to inform Earth system model parameters. Main types of variable contained Spatial location and grain The database contains 91,970 measurements of 18 plant traits. The most frequently measured traits (> 1,000 observations each) include plant height, leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf fresh and dry mass, leaf dry matter content, leaf nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus content, leaf C:N and N:P, seed mass, and stem specific density. Measurements were collected in tundra habitats in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, including Arctic sites in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Fennoscandia and Siberia, alpine sites in the European Alps, Colorado Rockies, Caucasus, Ural Mountains, Pyrenees, Australian Alps, and Central Otago Mountains (New Zealand), and sub-Antarctic Marion Island. More than 99% of observations are georeferenced. Time period and grain Major taxa and level of measurement All data were collected between 1964 and 2018. A small number of sites have repeated trait measurements at two or more time periods. Trait measurements were made on 978 terrestrial vascular plant species growing in tundra habitats. Most observations are on individuals (86%), while the remainder represent plot or site means or maximums per species. Software format csv file and GitHub repository with data cleaning scripts in R; contribution to TRY plant trait database (www.try-db.org) to be included in the next version release.Peer reviewe

Percutaneous coronary intervention versus coronary artery bypass grafting in patients with three-vessel or left main coronary artery disease: 10-year follow-up of the multicentre randomised controlled SYNTAX trial

Background: The Synergy between PCI with Taxus and Cardiac Surgery (SYNTAX) trial was a non-inferiority trial that compared percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) using first-generation paclitaxel-eluting stents with coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in patients with de-novo three-vessel and left main coronary artery disease, and reported results up to 5 years. We now report 10-year all-cause death results. Methods: The SYNTAX Extended Survival (SYNTAXES) study is an investigator-driven extension of follow-up of a multicentre, randomised controlled trial done in 85 hospitals across 18 North American and European countries. Patients with de-novo three-vessel and left main coronary artery disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to the PCI group or CABG group. Patients with a history of PCI or CABG, acute myocardial infarction, or an indication for concomitant cardiac surgery were excluded. The primary endpoint of the SYNTAXES study was 10-year all-cause death, which was assessed according to the intention-to-treat principle. Prespecified subgroup analyses were performed according to the presence or absence of left main coronary artery disease and diabetes, and according to coronary complexity defined by core laboratory SYNTAX score tertiles. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03417050. Findings: From March, 2005, to April, 2007, 1800 patients were randomly assigned to the PCI (n=903) or CABG (n=897) group. Vital status information at 10 years was complete for 841 (93%) patients in the PCI group and 848 (95%) patients in the CABG group. At 10 years, 244 (27%) patients had died after PCI and 211 (24%) after CABG (hazard ratio 1·17 [95% CI 0·97–1·41], p=0·092). Among patients with three-vessel disease, 151 (28%) of 546 had died after PCI versus 113 (21%) of 549 after CABG (hazard ratio 1·41 [95% CI 1·10–1·80]), and among patients with left main coronary artery disease, 93 (26%) of 357 had died after PCI versus 98 (28%) of 348 after CABG (0·90 [0·68–1·20], pinteraction=0·019). There was no treatment-by-subgroup interaction with diabetes (pinteraction=0·66) and no linear trend across SYNTAX score tertiles (ptrend=0·30). Interpretation: At 10 years, no significant difference existed in all-cause death between PCI using first-generation paclitaxel-eluting stents and CABG. However, CABG provided a significant survival benefit in patients with three-vessel disease, but not in patients with left main coronary artery disease. Funding: German Foundation of Heart Research (SYNTAXES study, 5–10-year follow-up) and Boston Scientific Corporation (SYNTAX study, 0–5-year follow-up).</p