472 research outputs found
Publish wisely or perish? an open archive for MarBEF
While scientists are publishing around two million papers annually (Odlyzko, 1998), it is surprising to notice that this growing resource of information is seldom easily accessible, even to those scientists. Basically, it is the community at large that funds almost all research, so all information resulting from this research should in principle be publicly available. However, in reality, too many barriers (mostly installed by the publisher) are blocking free and open access to scientific information
MarBEF publishing revisited
Networking and integration served within a partnership approach and covered with a delicious sauce of free and open access to data and information is MarBEF’s main dish, and it is this recipe that has helped MarBEF to successfully bring marine biodiversity research to a European level. Numerous meetings, workshops, training courses and Responsive Mode Projects (RMPs) have brought together many scientists. This integration has created endless new possibilities for new initiatives – the MarBEF Publication Series and the MarBEF Open Archive, to mention just two. So, is this having any effect on the way we publish as a network today
Maintaining native levels of shallow-water holothurian biodiversity in the western Indian Ocean (poster)
In East Africa, holothurian populations are currently reaching depletion due to extensive harvesting for the bĂŞche-de-mer industry in the Far East. However, to date, conservation and management of this fauna in an ecosystem approach is currently hardly feasible, for the simple reason that we still fail to name the different players in the game, let alone to monitor the interactions between these or yet other players in the ecosystem.We strongly believe that taxonomic accuracy sets the key to understanding both history and future of holothurian biodiversity, and that only such an approach will result in unambiguous hypotheses of species richness in the different parts of the western Indian Ocean. Our attempts reveal that several flaws in the taxonomy persistently obstructed a clear understanding of holothurian biodiversity. The present study compares the poorly investigated East African situation to the better studied South East African one and stresses that an ecosystem approach is difficult to attain before the taxonomy has reached sufficient stability
A structure preserving shift-invert infinite Arnoldi algorithm for a class of delay eigenvalue problems with Hamiltonian symmetry
In this work we consider a class of delay eigenvalue problems that admit a
spectrum similar to that of a Hamiltonian matrix, in the sense that the
spectrum is symmetric with respect to both the real and imaginary axis. More
precisely, we present a method to iteratively approximate the eigenvalues of
such delay eigenvalue problems closest to a given purely real or imaginary
shift, while preserving the symmetries of the spectrum. To this end the
presented method exploits the equivalence between the considered delay
eigenvalue problem and the eigenvalue problem associated with a linear but
infinite-dimensional operator. To compute the eigenvalues closest to the given
shift, we apply a specifically chosen shift-invert transformation to this
linear operator and compute the eigenvalues with the largest modulus of the new
shifted and inverted operator using an (infinite) Arnoldi procedure. The
advantage of the chosen shift-invert transformation is that the spectrum of the
transformed operator has a "real skew-Hamiltonian"-like structure. Furthermore,
it is proven that the Krylov space constructed by applying this operator,
satisfies an orthogonality property in terms of a specifically chosen bilinear
form. By taking this property into account during the orthogonalization
process, it is ensured that even in the presence of rounding errors, the
obtained approximation for, e.g., a simple, purely imaginary eigenvalue is
simple and purely imaginary. The presented work can thus be seen as an
extension of [V. Mehrmann and D. Watkins, "Structure-Preserving Methods for
Computing Eigenpairs of Large Sparse Skew-Hamiltonian/Hamiltonian Pencils",
SIAM J. Sci. Comput. (22.6), 2001], to the considered class of delay eigenvalue
problems. Although the presented method is initially defined on function
spaces, it can be implemented using finite dimensional linear algebra
operations
Taxonomic editors plan a World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)
An authoritative register of all marine species is urgently required to facilitate biological data exchange and management, integration of biological with other ocean data, and to allow taxonomists to focus on describing new species instead of overlooking recently described species and correcting past nomenclatural confusion (Costello et al., 2006). Its production has added benefits in fostering collaboration between experts at a global scale. Easy access to encourages submissions of overlooked species to the list. In turn, this stimulates biogeographic and evolutionary research
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